


Feathers and Ice

by sarahworm



Series: Halflings Born and Made [3]
Category: 12 Dancing Princesses (Fairy Tale), Die sechs Schwäne | The Six Swans, Fairy Tales & Related Fandoms
Genre: F/M, and they're all basically OCs at this point anyway, look tagging is hard none of them have original names, those are our two main protagonists at any rate, very much a WIP - please see notes on the first chapter for details
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-19
Updated: 2019-12-30
Packaged: 2020-09-08 04:13:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 13
Words: 33,532
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20306698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sarahworm/pseuds/sarahworm
Summary: When Princess Cygnie was twelve years old, her parents tried to kill a god.When Princess Sal was born, her father promised her soul to a demon.Initially ten years and miles apart, the two would end up in the same place, each working against a curse they didn't earn.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, I have two important things to note:
> 
> 1\. This story is very much a work in progress, moreso than the other two have been as I anticipate it being fairly long and I haven't outlined a lot of it. There's at least one other crossover character I haven't tagged yet because I'm not sure when they will enter the story. So, character and relationship tags are subject to change. 
> 
> 2\. There are a few decisions I'm still making about plot elements, and I don't expect any archive warnings to apply right now, but I've left it open for now until I get a better outline in place and can say for sure. The Six Swans is a weird, dark story. I do think the rating might increase as I go.

When Princess Cygnie was twelve years old, her parents tried to kill a god.

For most of Cygnie’s childhood, their kingdom had been one of prosperity. In the north, where she lived with her royal parents and six younger brothers, their castle was framed by a river and rolling hills, fed by the fruits of the golden-fielded south.

Between the two regions, a tangled forest worried at the land like a knot in a plank of pine. In generations past, their family had lived on the eve of the forest, a provincial capital for their small country. But then the princess to the north had fallen asleep, and Cygnie’s family had pushed into that defenseless territory, pressing their own borders up north. They called the place where Cygnie grew up the Summer Keep, even though she had always lived there year-round. There was a soft woods there, too, but it was as different from the forest at the country’s heart as a whisper is from a symphony.

When Cygnie was small, she had a nursemaid who used to tell her stories of the forest at bedtime. To hear her tell it, the center of the forest held a place where men became animals and animals became men. She said that a bed of nettles surrounded a clear spring, and if you drank from it, one wish would be granted. Mostly, she spoke of the god of the forest, who had a string of epithets like a row of pearls. The Forestborn, the Shadowed One, the Roadmaker, the Queen of the Nettles.

When Cygnie’s mother found out what words had been putting her daughter to sleep, the nursemaid was fired.

“Hush your crying,” her mother said when Cygnie refused to sleep her first night alone. She pulled the girl into her lap and fed her on facts and logic instead. “Gods only have power because we make them so. In the land to our east, they don’t even call them gods. They’re just witches, to be ignored, not worshiped. The roads run straight through the forest because our engineers and our soldiers build them so, not because of the god.”

They had named her Cygnette because her mother had come from the land to the south, and her family crest had been a swan. And she was never expected to rule. That honor would be for one of brothers, whichever one they deemed most worthy when all had grown.

As she approached the crest of her first decade, Cygnie began to hear the whispers in her parents’ court. That they were too reckless, carefree with their own lives, that raising nearly an octave of young children without a clear heir was madness.

But mostly, people talked about the shrine.

At the Keep’s central courtyard, as in all homes in the kingdom, lived their shrine to the forest god. An altar of maple and pine, capped with a crown of nettles. Tradition demanded that material offerings be placed within the nettles, and sustenance poured into the dirt below. Cygnie’s parents were too smart to forgo the keeping of the shrine entirely, but as Cygnie grew, she realized how unorthodox it was that neither she nor her brothers had ever been asked to take up the chore. It was always relegated to servants.

The one time she asked her mother, timidly, why they had broken tradition in this way, she got her shoulder squeezed in response. “She can claim ownership over my land,” said the Queen, who had only been through the forest once, for her marriage, “and she can take the offerings of my household, but I won’t let her have my children.”

In the years to come, Cygnie would be haunted by that moment. She would eventually learn that, no, gods did not have eyes everywhere, and that what happened later probably had nothing to do with her mother’s threat. But still the memory clung to her eyelids, tangling in her lashes when she slept.

***

The summer Cygnie was ten, a drought settled over the land like a woolen blanket. The golden fields withered and the rivers turned low and sour. Cygnie’s mother sent away to her homeland for provisions, but they were suffering the same fate and coule provide no aid.

Cygnie’s birthday in the fall was a tense affair.

With spring came some rain, just enough to seed the fields. And everyone breathed a sigh of relief, but then came a series of hailstorms, killing nearly a third of the ripening crop before it could be harvested. And even then they might have made it, if it hadn’t been for the reoccurrence of a deadly blight, unseen in nearly twenty years, which crept across the land like a shadow.

So it was that they endured a second hungry autumn. As the winter solstice passed, fortune-telling sprung up as a popular trade again. Everyone wanted to know how the third spring would go. Cygnie’s parents publically scoffed at the idea, but she swore she saw one particularly renowned soothsayer entering her mother’s chambers one night.

People began preparing to leave. Rumors spread that the land to the east was harboring a secret bounty for anyone who came to work. Others said that the northern woods had fruits for the taking while the court still slept.

But for a while that spring, it looked again like things might turn out alright. Crops grew and people began to speak about their homeland less like it was a broken thing, like a cracked bowl incapable of carrying water, and more like it was a newborn tree, needing only to be nurtured.

“Trust is a hard thing to rebuild,” Cygnie’s father told her in one of their rare conversations. “Mending this kingdom’s faith and trust will be difficult. But if we can do it right, we will all come out the stronger for it. You’ll see.”

When the word came of the swarm of locusts, moving northward and destroying every crop in sight, Cygnie’s father wept openly in the courtyard.

It was midsummer, Cygnie was twelve, and everyone knew they couldn’t survive another winder with minimal food.

After the locusts came, Cygnie’s parents locked themselves in their rooms for days. When they emerged, they did so in finery. The King was wearing his crown, which Cygnie had only seen before on the name-days of her younger brothers. The Queen was draped in pearls she’d brought with her from the south.

They gathered all the court in the open yard, standing before the altar of the forest god. Many of the courtiers probably expected them to announce a plan to cede something – territory, sovereignty, their daughter – to another country in exchange for food.

Instead, the Queen opened their gathering with apology.

“My people,” she began. “My people. We stand before you today with nothing more than open, empty hands. From the bottoms of our hearts, we’re truly sorry. We’re sorry that our failure to lead; no, that our failure to lead you away from corrupting influences has led us here, where even my own children have little to eat. For two years now, we have stumbled through this trial, this plague, praying that salvation was just around the corner. But when we prayed for rain, the skies gave us hail, and when we prayed for quiet, the earth brought us death. And now, when we have prayed for life, the fields have blessed us with thousands of lives, in the form of these locusts. And each time, we thought if we prayed hard enough, hoped hard enough, the torture would end. But it has not, and it will not until we remove the cancer at our country’s heart, the real source of all our troubles.”

The crowd shifted, jittery, hungry, and confused. Cygnie, stomach burning, suddenly saw with shining clarity where her mother was going with this, and felt her limbs grow heavy with dread.

The Queen raised one hand – brilliant rings flashing on the fingers – and pointed at the altar. “For how many years have we sacrificed and worshipped to the Shadowed One, and this is how we are repaid? For make no mistake, my people, this is her doing. She has grown jealous of us, of our livelihoods and our joy, out here in our fields, away from her trees, and she has wrapped her wrath upon this country like a stranglehold. Didn’t the rivers that dried up pass through her lands? Didn’t the blight pour out first upon the fields closest to the forest? Isn’t it said that all animals and insects in this land are her spies? We have loved her for decades, for centuries, and we have gotten nothing in return but this pain.”

Cygnie saw, suddenly, that the Queen’s hand was trembling. She thought back to her mother bidding her not to cry and banishing the god of the forest from her nursery. That bravado seemed far away, now.

“So what do you suggest we do?” one man shouted, suddenly. Terran, Duke over the lands nearest the forest, surrounding the city that had always served as the kingdom’s proper capitol, before Cygnie’s family moved to the Summer Keep year-round.

The Queen’s face went cool, blank as a sheet of glass. “I’m not _suggesting_,” she said. “We’re commanding. That witch will not take my livelihood, my country, my children’s future. We’re commanding, as of today, that all worship to the forest cease. Burn your altars. Do not pour any excess water onto the ground or anywhere but your own fenced gardens. Tell your people, tell your lands, that this is what their King and Queen have decreed.”

The courtyard erupted in words, whispers of discontent spilling over into shouts. The King and Queen let them burn for just a moment, and then the King turned and nodded to the two oldest of Cygnie’s brothers. Just boys still, mouths set, they stepped forward and pushed over the altar.


	2. Chapter 2

Cygnie never knew exactly how many of the King and Queen’s loyal subjects obeyed the commands and ceased their worship, but desperation is a powerful force.

It became autumn, and everyone waited for news of the fall crops – pumpkin, squash, cucumbers – and whether they had survived the summer. Cygnie, listening still to the mutterings in court, heard the popular speculation that a failure this time would spell the end of her parents’ reign. Some days, she thought they seemed to hunger for it, eager to gorge their empty stomachs on upheaval and the fall of the mighty.

But the cold-weather plants turned in a bumper crop that year. True, there was still little wheat for bread, the animals were thin or gone, and the rivers were low, but the ground had finally given forth food fit to be eaten.

The King and Queen announced a victory, standing in their courtyard where the altar had once been. To celebrate, the Queen said, she would travel to a town just south of the Forest, where the largest pumpkin had been reported, to bestow favor upon the owner and rejoice in the turn of fortune with her people.

Cygnie hugged her mother around the waist and didn’t want to let go. Finally, her father untangled her fingers and gave her her youngest brother, barely more than three, to hold instead. Cygnie clutched him to her narrow shoulders and watched as her mother, the Queen, waved to the court one last time before mounting her horse and disappearing.

The Queen had taken three foot soldiers with her. When she set off for home, se brought the grower of the prize-winning pumpkin with her, promising him a job at court.

One week after the little entourage left the village, a waxy-haired boy of sixteen burst from the Forest and collapsed in the old capitol city.

With the boy incoherent for days, Duke Terran sent men into the Forest to search for the Queen, but at every turn they were blocked by curtains of vines, by trees grown together in some kind of mutated fortification, or were lost in an endless fog. The main road, the King’s road, still ran straight and true, but one step to either side, and the seeker was instantly barricaded or confused.

The official search went on for weeks, but everyone knew within days that there was no hope. The green vines and quiet shades of the forest had taken the Queen, and there would be no getting her back.

The King declared seven years of mourning, one for each of the children he had shared with his wife. And with that pronouncement, made before the velvet-shrouded tomb of his family, he vanished from public view.

The land prospered anyway, greener throughout Cygnie’s fourteenth year than it had ever been in her childhood. And if the people whispered that maybe a sacrifice of their foreigner Queen had been worth such bounty, well, the King wasn’t around to hear them anyway.

The King’s only other act, after the funeral, was to hire the pumpkin-grower, Sebastian, as his personal attendant, dismissing his other servants. From then on, it was Sebastian who brought the King his meals, delivered his laundry, conveyed his messages when the King refused to leave his room. The maids laughed at his clumsy country ways, and called him the seventh son, but to Cygnie and her brothers he became like a fifth limb awkwardly grafted onto their family, living only in the wake of their own tragedy.

As the oldest, and the daughter, the running of the royal household fell to Cygnie. She tried to take up the mantle without complaint, thinking every time she closed her eyes of how her mother must have looked going into the forest she so hated. Cygnie imagined that her shoulders had been square, that she had pointed her men onward as through she had all the forces of the southern sea behind her finger. For years, as she coaxed her tired and growing body to sleep, Cygnie saw her mother’s heels digging into the flanks of an invigorated horse and heard the pounding of hooves on packed earth, disappearing into the trees.

When Cygnie turned twenty, and the seven years were about to be up, the self-appointed chancellors who had been telling her they were guarding the realm, announced that they were going to drag the King out of his seclusion and make him pick an heir. They said that it was for his own good, that the country needed stability. Cygnie knew that they really just wanted the matter settled so they could get on with jockeying to have the eligible young women from their families married to the chosen successor. 

By the time they got the King to make an appearance in the audience chamber, weeks later, it had been months since Cygnie had seen him last. She stood behind the line of her teenaged brothers and watched as the King looked them over and sighed through the various speeches from the chancellors, all offering advice on how to make this decision. 

After what seemed like an age of this, the King held up a weathered hand. The man speaking paused mid-breath, and the whole group seemed to lean forward, parched for the King’s words at last. 

He spoke slowly, as if re-accustoming his throat to the act of giving out the law with only his words. “This land needs a queen, like I had,” he said, voice quiet but still. “I will take my sons south, to the land of their mother’s birth. Whichever chooses a bride I approve of first shall be called my heir.”

Cygnie excused herself from the hissing and muttering of the audience chamber and sought out a place nestled in the roof. A little garden which was a favorite of hers - barely seven feet square, open to the air and accessible only through one of the windows above the castle wall.

She’d been working several days on an embroidered drapery, and now she forced her fingers to fly as fast as her thoughts. She wasn’t surprised at what her father was doing, but the thought of the south swallowing up the whole rest of her family for weeks felt like shards of glass in her mouth. 

She was trying so hard to focus on the work, only the work, that she didn’t hear Sebastian creep up until he asked if he could sit next to her. 

Cygnie and Sebastian had never been companionable, but she couldn’t see a way to saying no. Sebastian folded himself up next to her like a crumpled piece of parchment. She’d never seen him up here before. 

She hadn’t talked to Sebastian much at all, really. What is there to say to the man who carries your father’s missing words on his tongue?

“I guess you won’t be going with them, then,” he said, his sentence cresting and breaking like a gust of wind. 

“No. I suppose you will?”

He shook his head. “I’m going to tell him I won’t. I won’t go back through that place.”

Cygnie put down her embroidery and studied him. He was looking straight ahead, wind tickling his hair. So this wasn’t a conversation, then, but a confession. Best to get it over with. 

“You’re afraid,” she said, holding her voice even. “You’re a true believer.” 

“If you’d seen what I saw…”

“I saw my mother disappear,” Cygnie said sharply. “That was enough for me.”

Sebastian looked at her. She squared her shoulders, and under his gaze, she found words pouring out of her mouth like a high tide. 

“Why should it matter it matter to me how she died?” she said, her tongue coated in salt. “She’s gone, and they’ve given me her place, and I’ve taken it up, and I’m never going to see her again, or know how she looked when she went into those woods.”

“I could tell--” Sebastian began, but she cut him off. 

“It’s not the same thing. You didn’t know her.” 

“You don’t want your father to go, either,” he said softly. “He wants revenge, but you don’t. You’re a believer too.”

“I’m not. I don’t have any use for fairy stories to comfort me, or nightmares to scare me. I don’t believe in futile hopes, and I certainly don’t believe in giving her what she wants. If she has any real power at all, she feeds when we’re irrational, when we throw all we are after her, seeking appeasement or forgiveness or revenge. When we do that, she wins.” Cygnie stood up and folded the cloth together with a snap, left Sebastian sitting in the open wind. 

The journey south was long. Cygnie’s family was gone for nearly three months. The journey was long, but not that long. But surely, she told herself, surely they stayed several weeks at the foreign court. 

The day they returned dawned slow and heavy. When Cygnie woke, the air smelled bitter and tasted of crabapples, even though it was now well into winter. 

They positioned Cygnie atop the Keep’s gate with the advisors to welcome her father home. Shivering despite her cloak, she watched her family approach. Her brothers were leading the procession, the younger ones waving wildly up at them and making their horses dance in the snow. 

The oldest one had another rider sharing his horse. A young woman perched in the saddle, leaning forward. As they neared the gate, Cygnie saw that she was freckled, with curling red hair. Like her own. Like her mothers. The southern bride, she must be. But why was she not riding alone? Surely she could at least bring her own horse to this wedding?

The layers of guards and attendants following her brothers reached the gate and parted, splitting suddenly like a lightning-struck tree. There was Cygnie’s father, steps from his home, and at his side was the lightning. 

A woman on a horse, tall, pale hair streaming past her shoulders and held back by a series of ribbons - no, they were feathers. Cygnie leaned over the stone, squinting at the woman’s face. She was not beautiful, but captivating nevertheless - all angles, as if someone had drawn the outline of a woman and left her to illuminated only by the moon. 

“He comes like a shade from the dead,” Sebastian muttered from his place beside her.

It was a quotation from an old epic about a long-gone king. “I didn’t know you read,” Cygnie said, glancing at him in surprise. 

“My aunt is a storyteller. She has it memorized.” Sebastian’s eyes were gazing down, pinned to the figure of her father. Cygnie had barely noticed him for the woman who rode beside him, but when she looked at his face now, she felt a creeping dread come over her.

Sebastian was wrong - her father had looked like a man dead, defeated, for the past seven years. The visage he wore now, while grim, was not despair. It was anger, steeled anger, the likes of which he’d last worn when standing beside his wife and ordering an alter turned over. 

Cygnie looked back at the quiet woman approaching her home, and knew with a certainty that she had not come from the south.

The procession made its way over the threshold. The gate slammed shut.


	3. Chapter 3

Cygnie couldn’t remember her new stepmother’s name.

It wasn’t that she was careless, or that they’d never been properly introduced. Cynie’s father had marched his court through the perfunctory, etiquette-required introductions as soon as they’d made it through the gate. And though the wedding had yet to take place, the woman was always seated at their family’s table for meals now, and Cygnie had murmured requests for her to pass a plate or two over the weeks.

And it wasn’t that she was avoiding her. When her father had landed in the courtyard, taken the woman’s slim hand, and held it up for all his subjects to see the symbol of promise shining on her finger, Cygnie had been seized by a wild jealousy on behalf of her mother. A violent, thorny thing, springing into place in her guts. She’d excused herself as quickly as possible, after taking her father’s hug as simply as she could, and headed up to her hideaway garden under the eaves, letting the wind take her sobs away.

But then it passed. This woman was a presence now, and if Cygnie could do anything, she could adapt to the truths she was told. When she was small, her nursemaid had told her how the world was and her mother had taken those truths and given her new ones. And if the close-held truth being shattered now – that her father loved her mother above all, that nothing in her future was destined to change – was a particularly tender one, well. She’d learned how to grow scar tissue over her heart seven years ago.

So the days turned into weeks, and slowly, the turning wheel of the court shaped itself around the twin axels of the King and his new fiancée. There wasn’t a wedding date marked – or if there was, Cygnie couldn’t remember it – but everyone she saw around her was engaged in wedding planning. The cooks were constantly preparing samples of cake and trifles for the bride-to-be to sample, the gardeners were furiously forcing the long-neglected grounds and courtyard into shape, and Cygnie herself was tasked at the head of a battalion of maids and seamstresses, embroidering endless yards of wedding tapestry and wedding linens and wedding table dressings.

The bride herself was engaged in some secret project of her own. “It’s a surprise, for the wedding day,” she said to Cygnie’s father, when he asked her at dinner why she had been so secluded in her chambers with a spinning wheel. All Cygnie knew was that the woman had arrived with only one trunk of presumed clothing, but three great sacks of something which she’d ordered brought up as soon as the unpacking began. Cygnie couldn’t see into them from where she stood, but she watched the men tasked with carrying them heave the sacks over their shoulders and then straighten up, as though they bore hardly any weight at all.

Maybe Cygnie hadn’t been able to keep track of the woman’s name because she’d been too busy watching her father. The presentation in the courtyard had been so brief, and his face so quiet, that she was sure this marriage must have been not of his own choice. Several times, she caught his eyes turning backwards over his shoulder, just briefly, before the castle gates were closed again.

But as the days since her family’s returned stretched longer, he relaxed. Cygnie watched as his shoulders began to straighten and his brows began to lift occasionally, even once or twice in merriment at something his bride had said at dinner. She watched life begin to color him once again, and decided all of her previous suspicions had been for nothing.

Sebastian was still on hand to follow her father everywhere, still his preferred errand boy, but even his step was lighter, these days. And every so often, she caught her father with one hand tousling Sebastian’s hair, almost as though he’d become a seventh son. Cygnie hadn’t spoken to Sebastian since the day the party arrived home, and as she was absorbed in her assigned wedding tasks, she didn’t even have time to wonder what he thought of her father’s change.

***

The morning of the wedding dawned misty. Fog hung low, wrapping the castle’s turrets in bits of stubborn cloud. Cygnie awoke at the sun’s first ray hitting her bedroom floor, stretching her aching fingers and wondering if any actual rain would put the day off. It was going to be an outdoor ceremony, in the castle courtyard.

But by mid-morning, when Cygnie was ordered to supervise her younger brothers’ dressing, the sun had burned away the mist and Cygnie squinted against a clear blue sky. She stuck her head in their door, made sure they’d kept their suits neatly pressed, and then went to linger in front of her own mirror.

Her dress was an old one of her mothers’, made over into something new. It was a deep green, twisting at the waist and falling in twining layers to the floor. Like forest vines. Forest green. Her auburn hair was meant to have been pulled back, with her simple circlet brought out of storage and nestled among coaxed curls, but she let it fall to her shoulders and rested the band on her forehead. Despite all she’d done to quench her worries about whatever had lead her father to return with a bride of his own, the impending change of the day felt heavy, and she wanted to meet it just as she was. Daughter of her mother, who fought the forest.

The courtyard was packed with people – all the courtiers and nobles crowding either side of the central aisle, servants lining the walls behind them. The few plants that had managed to survive the few years of neglect had been nourished back to health, and multitudes of others brought in, so the walls were bursting with green.

Cygnie and her brothers were told to stand behind the platform where her father and his new wife would be joined. A living arch, the harried gardeners’ crowning glory, curved over the simple wooden box. Cygnie and her brothers lined up, and soon trumpets sounded and her father joined them, wearing his full finery as Cygnie had only seen a few times before.

All of this she had expected. But what she had not expected was what had been placed in front of the platform, blocking the way of the bride’s ascension up the aisle.

The altar to the god of the forest. The one her mother had blasphemed, and her father had pushed over. The one blamed for all of their troubles, condemned and left to rot unattended. Someone had repaired it, polished the wood and supplied living thistles. It was even furnished with offerings: small portions of the feast they were all to enjoy in the afternoon, when the ceremony was over.

Cygnie could do nothing but stare, having no idea what to make of what had happened. When her father took his place, she saw nerves and maybe something like fear across his countenance – but nothing like shock, nothing like rage.

The trumpets sounded again, and the court turned as one to watch the bride enter. Normally, she would have been escorted by her parents, or a sponsor, someone who could vouch for her character when marrying into a station so far above her own. But as she had come alone, she walked alone, and as she went, the pulled the silence of the audience towards her, seeming to soak in it like the sun’s rays.

She was all in white, and her dress was woven from feathers. Over her arm, she carried something. When Cygnie first saw her, she thought it was a bundle. When she looked again, she saw that they were shirts. Plain, white shirts, but finely sewn and of some material Cygnie couldn’t recognize.

The woman stopped before the King, knelt before his hand, and kissed his outstretched palm. As was tradition. Then she placed her hand in his, and he raised her before him, as was also tradition.

Then she turned and knelt again, before the altar, placing her brow to the polished wood.

As had been tradition, perhaps, once upon a time, in a country more pious and less bruised by fate and the seeming whims of a cruel god.

Cygnie gasped, she couldn’t help herself. And as the woman stood, and turned, her eyes caught Cygnie’s for a brief moment. Cygnie didn’t see smugness, as she thought she might, or even anger. Just pity.

Cygnie dug a fingernail into the weave of her forest-green dress.

The wedding vows of their country had never been designed to be long, but they had been designed to be binding. Cygnie listened as her father and this woman promised to be loyal, to listen, and to defend each other. She watched as they each pricked a finger and shed a drop of blood on the ground as a symbol of the hardships they would bear together. She trembled as her father placed her mother’s crown on the new queen’s head.

When the vows were done and the newlyweds had clasped hands, there was only one piece of the ceremony left. Each must ask the other a question, meant to be the request closest to their heart, and should it be granted, the wedding was blessed and the marriage sure to shine bright.

Most couples planned their wishes in advance, especially those in the nobility. Cygnie knew her father and his new wife would have discussed this together, decided on what simple and showy gesture they might make to give their subjects faith in them as a unit.

So when her father looked down at her stepmother and asked what her heart most desired, and her stepmother pointed at the altar and said, clear as the open sky, that she wished for him to honor the faith of his parents, Cygnie didn’t think it had been planned.

But her father, face betraying nothing, took a twist of dried meat from his pocket and placed it among the thorns. He had no water, but he spat into the ground below the table, an old custom for giving even in times of drought.

And he knelt. Cygnie watched as her father, King of her country and her only parent left, knelt before a god he’d denounced all of her life.

When he stood again, the queen asked what he desired most of all.

“For you to honor my children as they deserve,” he said. And though he flashed a small smile at Cygnie and her brothers, his voice did not warm.

The queen nodded. And then, she beamed. And though Cygnie could no longer pretend to like her, to trust her at all – it was a smile as brilliant as a flash of sun on a rippling pond, and for a moment, Cygnie could almost grasp a spark of hope that things would turn out alright after all.

Then her stepmother turned, and took the shirts from over her arm. One by one, she shook them out, delicately, smiling still. One by one, she flung them at Cygnie’s brothers, each one landing with dreamlike grace, none of their targets moving out of the way. She looked at Cygnie last. She had no shirts left, but one hand moved like she meant to extend it. But she only looked, and her hand dropped.

For one moment, Cygnie felt only confusion, and then she began to tingle with relief, that the ceremony was finally over.

And then her brothers began to change. 


	4. Chapter 4

First, they screamed.

Cygnie couldn’t tell right away that anything was wrong, but her youngest brother was screaming, and then all of a sudden all of them were, lungs wrung out from screaming so loud. She looked again, and they were twisting, shoulders bending inwards and elbows turned out unnaturally. The brother nearest to her held out a hand. It was covered with little pebbly bumps. Cygnie thought at first that he had gotten a rash – but as she looked, they grew, and she realized they were feathers, growing from his skin.

The King was shouting, hovering his hands over his oldest son as though afraid to touch him without causing more pain, calling for guards and doctors, his new wife forgotten. But Cygnie turned to the Queen.

She had not moved from her platform, still standing just as she had after she’d thrown the shirts. Watching. Cygnie sprung on her, took her shoulders in her hands, forced the woman’s face torwards her.

“Make it stop!” she found herself shouting. “Stop hurting them!”

The Queen blinked. Slowly, so slowly, as Cygnie could still hear her brothers crying behind her, the Queen’s eyes found focus on Cygnie’s. She looked empty; where just moments before had been a lightning bolt of a woman, a sorceress of some kind, now there was just clear blue irises and wisps of hair fluttering in the wind.

“It won’t be so bad, next time,” she said. “The first loss is the hardest, and then it becomes all the same. But then, you know that already, don’t you.”

When she spoke, it wasn’t the same voice as before. When laughing at the dinner table and giving orders for her wedding day and reciting her vows, the Queen’s voice had rung open and pristine as a kept stream. Now, Cygnie could hear the effort behind every syllable, and there was a rasp in her breath like wind through the trees.

Cygnie began to shake her again, to demand once more that she make everything stop, but as she gripped her fingers around the woman’s shoulders, they began to sink into her. Before her eyes, the woman was fading, dissolving. Seconds later Cygnie could see right through her face to the ground below, and seconds after that, her hands became full fists as there was nothing they could hold onto anymore.

The Queen was gone. And it was at that moment that Cygnie realized that the screaming had stopped.

She turned. First she saw her father on his knees. Then, she saw the ring of guards around him, some looking wildly around for the vanished Queen, some staring into space. One was holding the arm of the court doctor, who had his hands up in resignation.

Then Cygnie saw that where her brothers had been there were now six swans. Six perfectly formed, if slightly ruffled, swans.

The one in front, who had been her oldest brother, took a step forward. He wobbled, and opened his beak. A horrible squawking noise came out. He turned, extended his wings, and rose unsteadily into the air. The others following, and Cygnie found herself standing, with her father and her whole court, watching her brothers fly away.

Cygnie didn’t see her father after that. He left the courtyard without a word, tears streaming down his face. After a moment, Sebastian followed him, and just like that, the King was back in his rooms, back to pretending he’d never been King at all.

Cygnie supervised the clearing away of the wedding finery and the distributing of food to the castle denizens. After all, there was no one else to do it.

They burned the arch that the gardeners had grown and tended for the wedding. That evening, Cygnie stood in the courtyard and thrust a torch into the viney depths of it. A few servants were on hand to sweep up the ashes once it had gone, but mostly she was alone. The stinging of the smoke, finally, drew the tears from her eyes.

She didn’t think she would fall asleep that night, but she did, deeply, and even dreaming. She dreamt of holding the Queen in her hands, watching her dissolve over and over. Sometimes the woman’s face was the bride her father had brought back with him, but as the dream went on, Cygnie saw her mother’s face, melting away again and again.

She awoke to a tapping on her window. Sitting up, she could see that it was just before dawn. The sun’s light hadn’t yet made it into her room.

At her window was a swan. Cygnie jumped to her feet, rushing to throw open the window and nearly tripping in her bedsheets as she did so. The swan tumbled into the room, clearly not yet used to his wings or the newfound size of his body. And as Cygnie gaped, unsure whether to try and talk to him, the swan changed back into her oldest brother.

The change was fluid, this time. Like an unfolding – limbs emerging where none had been, her brother straightening up as though he’d just been sitting on the floor. He shivered, and feathers fell. He was still wearing the clothes he had had at the wedding, but they were in tatters.

Cygnie flung her arms around him, and then broke away just as fast, heading for the door, but he caught her arm and stopped her. 

“Sister,” he said, his voice grave. He was barely nineteen, and just days before Cygnie had watched him wrestle in the dirt with the stablehand, but he sounded years older now. “I can’t stay. We have a quarter of an hour, just before dawn, to be ourselves, but when the sun breaks over the horizon, I will be a swan again.”

“Let me get our father, let him see you at least briefly,” Cygnie whispered, sobs caught in her throat.

He shook his head. “It would only hurt him worse, to see me leave again. Tell him that we’re alright, that we’ll stay close as we try to find a way to undo this curse. Take care of this place and we’ll try to see you when we can. One of us will come to your window in the mornings and let you know we’re safe.”

Cygnie nodded. “Do you really think you can end it?” she asked.

He grimaced, and for a moment, looked just like the boy Cygnie had always known. “I don’t know. We’re planning to travel, find the source of this magic and force her to turn us back.”

“Her?”

He glanced back at the window and flinched. “When I changed, my mouth tasted like nettles.”

Cygnie started to ask him another question, but at that moment the sun’s full light hit the room, and she couldn’t help but squint. When she opened her eyes again, a large swan was leaving through the window.

She got dressed in the sturdiest clothes she had, including a floor-length cloak she’s taken from her mother’s closet years ago. It was a dark brown and heavy over her shoulders. Then she went and knocked her fist hard against her father’s door.

After what felt like minutes, Sebastian opened it. He looked at her and his brow wrinkled. “Are you going somewhere?”

Cygnie looked over his shoulder and shouted at the dark interior of the room. “Dad! I’m going to save them! I’m going to the forest-“

Sebastian shoved himself into her, pulling the door shut. “What are you doing?” he hissed.

Cygnie glared at him. “One of my brothers came to see me this morning. They turn back for a quarter of an hour just before dawn, and he told me that they think the forestborn did this. He needs to know that. I’m going to go after her. I’m going to go into the forest and get them back.”

Sebastian rolled his eyes and sighed, heavily. “_Of course_ the forestborn did this,” he said. “I don’t know who exactly that woman was, but I know he picked her up in the forest. You think hearing that from _you _will make him feel any better?”

“No, but he needs to hear that he can speak to them sometimes, if he wishes.” Cygnie tried to push past him, but he held the door firmly closed. “Let me go talk to my father!”

“No. Not if you’re going to tell him you’re leaving. He won’t let you go.”

“He can’t stop me.”

“He’s still the King. He could. But I don’t want him to.”

Cygnie opened her mouth, and then closed it again, looking at him. “I thought you were scared of the forest.”

“I am. Believe me, I’m not going back there. But if you think you can get your brothers back – you might be the first member of your family to walk in with your eyes wide open, and that might be enough to make the difference.”

“Alright. Alright, I won’t tell him. But I have to tell him that I spoke with my brother this morning. He has to know.”

Sebastian nodded. He released his grip on the door handle, and gently pushed it open a crack, letting Cygnie through.

Her father’s drapes were open, but he was still in his dressing gown, sitting at his desk and staring out the window. As Cygnie entered, he turned, and the look of despair on his face was so much deeper than even how she’d seen him after her mother had died. His gaze fixed on Cygnie for a moment, and then shifted beyond her before swinging back around to the window.

_Ruined, _she thought. _He looks ruined. _

“Hello, daughter,” her father said.

She told him, as quickly as she could, about the conversation she’d had just before dawn that morning. Her words fell like stones into a bottomless well; he didn’t look lifted at all, even the slightest bit, by the idea that he could speak to his sons again.

When she finished speaking, she stood in silence for a moment.

“Thank you,” he said, finally. “I don’t expect to sleep much, these coming days. It will not be hard to awaken at dawn and see my children. But it doesn’t matter.”

His voice was hard, flat, the word of law even after everything.

“It doesn’t matter. My kingdom is gone, then my wife, and now my sons. All that I had to give my people after I am gone. All I will leave them now is a tomb.”

“I’m still here,” Cygnie said, voice breaking.

He looked at her again, considering. For an instant, Cygnie thought maybe his countenance would change, and maybe they could be allies in the coming days.

“No,” he said. “I had seven children, but I had six sons, and you are not the same thing. Find yourself a husband, I suppose, and he can have my land and your children can make something new of it. Or stay here and tend this hearth until it dies. Either way, the future will not be what your mother and I planned for you, and I am sorry.”

Cygnie felt winded, unmoored, like if she tried to take a step away her feet would crumple beneath her. “What did you plan for me?”

He sighed. “You were to be our shining star, flung out into the cosmos to make a new home elsewhere and bring them closer to us. Like your mother did, here. Sons are bound to the land they’re born to, but daughters are untied, bound only to yourself. You were our gift to the wider world.”

“A bargaining chip. You would have married me off for diplomacy or trade.”

The King shrugged. “Maybe. The point is, I have nothing to offer with you, now. So go as you will.”

He turned back to the window, and Cygnie knew she had been dismissed. Never had her father treated her so coldly before. The name of the road she planned to take was open in her mouth, unfolded and ready to be spoken, but she steeled her heart against it.

_Fine_, she thought. _I may not be bound to this land, but I’m going to fight against its demons the way that you won’t. _She realized that some part of her had wanted to come before her father and leave the castle blessed as a hero, with his goodwill urging her onwards to bring her brothers back for their kingdom. But she didn’t want that, anymore. _I’ll bring them back because I won’t keep letting my family be ripped apart by that cursed forest. I’ll bring them back, and then I will decide where I want to go._

Sebastian was leaning against the wall when Cygnie emerged, and as she started down the corridor, he jumped up and followed her.

“Cygnie!”

She turned, but didn’t stop walking. She felt that if she stood still for even a moment under this castle, allowed herself to think about her place here, she would break down. “What?”

He had something clenched in his hand, and as he opened it, she saw a single leaf. “I took this from her, seven years ago. I think it might be why I managed to get out. You should take it with you. Maybe it will allow you to make it to the heart of the forest, so you can speak with her.”

“You know I don’t believe in superstitions,” Cygnie said curtly. “I’m not going because I’m suddenly in awe of her power, I’m going because she clearly wants our blood, and there must be some other way of satiating that want or negotiating with her. I don’t need tricks of my own.”

He thrust the leaf at her again. “You don’t have to believe me. Just take it. Consider it a favor, or payment for taking care of your father all these years.”

“We’ve been giving you actual payment for that.” But she took the leaf.

He almost smiled, and handed her a pin. “I’ve been keeping it inside of my clothes. It doesn’t break.”

She pinned it to an inner fold of the cloak. “Any other advice you want to give me about the forest, before I go?”

He looked serious again. “Keep moving, keep thinking of your goal. Where she lives – it isn’t remarkable, not something you can find by following landmarks. We came upon it because she wanted us to.”

This wasn’t very helpful. Cygnie waited for a minute, but all he said was, “good luck. Don’t forget why you went in.”

So she left him there, and she left the castle, taking a horse from the stable and riding south into crisp air.


	5. Chapter 5

Four days into the forest, Cygnie started talking to the birds.

After days of riding, meeting the edge of the forest had been liking waking up from a dream. She’d pulled the horse up short, replenished her supplies in town, and then positioned herself in the middle of the road, looked at the trees, and tried to calm her own breathing.

The trunks and vines of this forest had haunted her nightmares for so many years. Over and over again, she had seen the image of her mother fading into its shadows in her mind. It was so familiar that seeing it for the first time in her life didn’t feel like a shock, or even like anything new. It felt like pressing a hand to an old bruise.

But in all those nightmares, she’d never once seen herself inside of the forest. Right after her mother died, one of her youngest brothers had come to her bedroom, weeping, because he’d been caught in a dream where the trees held him fast and kept him from screaming. But Cygnie had never had reason to fear the forest for her own body, and so it had never frightened her in that way. Until she was standing in front of it, about to willingly surrender herself.

In the end, her horse shifted on its feet, and she continued onwards and inwards. Of course she did. She had no choice. Or rather, she’d made her choice already, and now she was just living out the consequences. That’s what she told herself, whispered, as the shadows overtook them and the harsh sound of the horse’s hooves on the road faded under a covering of dirt and leaves.

She wasn’t sure whether to stay on the road or not. On the one hand, everyone who’d managed to go through the forest and come out the other side had stuck to the road – that was what it was built for. Cygnie remembered the stories after her mother’s disappearance, about what happened to the soldiers who went looking for her.

On the other hand…Cygnie touched Sebastian’s leaf. The people she knew who came out of the forest after meeting with the god must have done so because she wanted them to. Cygnie had come here to confront her. There was no use putting it off.

Remembering what Sebastain had said, Cygnie closed her eyes and conjured up every detail of the forest god she could remember from her childhood stories. She thought about her goal as hard as she could, and when she opened her eyes, there was a trail leading off from the road.

It was a narrow opening, not much wider than a deer’s path. Cygnie stepped down from her horse and hoisted her two bags of water and small satchel of food over her back. Then she turned the horse pointing back the way they had come, and slapped its flank until it took off. She hoped it would emerge and find a new owner in the town at the forest’s edge.

The trees lining the road were dense, impossible to get through unless you squeezed yourself sideways without a path. Cygnie had thought the whole forest might be this way, but after only an hour of following the trail she’d found, the trees began to open again. The path faded into the ground and it was almost like walking in the woods near her home – sunlight filtering through the canopy, trees growing in clusters or forming small clearings. As Cygnie continued walking, trying to focus on her goal, it felt almost pleasant.

It was so pleasant that, hours later, when she heard a squirrel rustle in a nearby bush, it knocked her out of a reverie and she was ashamed to realize how much she’d let her mind wander and relax, just taking in the quiet air. She’d been walking for nearly half the day at this point, and yet her feet didn’t ache. And, she discovered with alarm, she couldn’t really remember the way she’d come, or if she’d been heading in a certain direction. She found a stump, drank some of her water, and firmly shook herself, knowing for sure that she would never get anywhere if she continued to be so aimless.

But keeping focus proved harder than she expected. So many times, that first and second day, she had to stop, pinch herself, and walk backwards a few minutes until she felt that she had got her bearings again. She had been trying to go in a straight line, keeping the sun in front of her, but she knew it was more than likely that she’d wavered in every direction by now.

At night, she would make a tiny fire and curl up on the ground. She had no way of securing herself to a tree branch, and wouldn’t have known how, so she grimly accepted the number of small creatures that might be crawling over her as she slept. She couldn’t decide if the nights or the days were worse. At night, all she could do was listen to every little sound until sleep finally came, wondering if the forest god were the type to steal her while she lay unconscious. But when she woke to the mornings, an endless day of trance-like wandering lay before her, and she had to urge herself to get up.

On the third day, she tried going one tree at a time, picking on in the distance and thinking of nothing else until she reached it. It wasn’t the same thing as imagining her end goal, but she hoped desperately that a devotion to the trees of the forest was close enough to the same thing as a focus on its god.

By the fourth day, she was walking with her teeth clenched, fingernails pressed against her palms or pinching her arms, trying to stay awake. And it was then that she began chattering to the birds. And once she’d done that once, there suddenly seemed to be birds everywhere, all different kinds. She wasn’t sure how she hadn’t noticed that before.

“Hello, chickadee. Hello, starling. Hello, Mr. Woodpecker. Say, I don’t suppose you can show me to where I need to go, can you?”

She’d stopped to talk to the woodpecker, and as she did, he ceased his pecking and his head stilled, pointed in her direction. She was almost sure that he was looking at her.

“Come on,” she said. “Give me a sign, and I’ll be in your debt.”

The woodpecker cocked his head, and then hopped to his left, going around the tree and landing on a side off in a different direction from the way Cygnie had been heading.

“Thank you,” she said. “May you find many tasty insects soon.” And, having nothing else to go on, she followed the path of the woodpecker.

She spoke to every bird she saw, that day. Most of them ignored her or just blinked when she asked for directions, but some moved in a way she could have sworn was intentional. When Cygnie settled down for the night, she still had no idea where she was, but she at least felt satisfied that she’d picked at strategy to follow.

She was woken in the middle of the night by an owl’s call. Sitting upright, she saw two yellow eyes gazing at her from a nearby branch, and she scrambled to her feet, almost forgetting her food bag in her haste. She followed the owl as it swooped from branch to branch, once memorably diving after a mouse. Finally, it flew too high for her to keep track of, so she settled down again to sleep away what was left of the dark.

When Cygnie woke up again, the forest was silent. The birds were gone. The path she’d been so sure of, strange as it was, had vanished, and she had nothing to do but begin her monotonous walk again.

At midday, tired and thirsty as she always was now, Cygnie found a single robin. Poking at the ground, hopping about a bit but staying in the same little area. Without even thinking about it, Cygnie dropped to her knees and began scrabbling in the dirt alongside it. Many minutes later, having unearthed one small seed, or something she thought was a seed, she thrust her open hand in the robin’s face.

“Here,” she said. “For you. Do you have a path you can show me, a sign, anything?”

The robin looked at her. It cheeped. Slowly, it plucked the seed from her hand, backed away, and took to the air.

The robin fluttered fairly slowly away, and Cygnie followed, crashing through the foliage but managing to keep it in her sights. The robin flew back and forth, sometimes making sharp turns, and as they drew further and further away Cygnie became more sure she might have been on to something after all.

The robin broke into a small clearing, and Cygnie followed, panting a little. The robin circled once, twice, and then disappeared into a bush only a few feet away from where she stood. Cygnie went after it, parting the leaves to see down into the plant.

The Robin landed on a little branch, swallowed the seed it had been carrying all this time, and then settled on a tiny nest, hidden under the leaves, which was cradling two blue eggs. Cygnie watched it minutes and minutes, but it didn’t move again. After a while, it almost seemed to go to sleep.

Slowly, Cygnie let her hands fall and the bush close back up. She fell back on her heels, and then collapsed onto her back, laying spread-eagled on the forest floor. The temptation to give up, to stay here until she fell asleep and not wake up, was so great. And despite all the sticks and rocks she distantly knew were digging into her skin, it was almost comfortable, being this low to the ground.

As she relaxed, one of her hands fluttered down and came to rest right over the place she’d pinned the leaf. She heard it crinkle just slightly under the pressure, and with that reminder of who she’d come for and why, she was suddenly furious. Cygnie leapt to her feet, more full of energy than she’d been in days, and raised her head to the sky.

“Stop playing with me!” she shouted. “I have come to speak to the god of the forest, the queen of the nettles! I am the daughter of the King and Queen of this land, and I will _not_ be put astray!”

Her words echoed in the open air, but nothing happened. As Cygnie stood, breathing hard, she realized that shouting would get her nothing, but she couldn’t bear the thought of walking a single step more into a forest that probably didn’t end. She couldn’t do it, and she wouldn’t.

_Better to die here, having tried, than let her lead me anywhere she wants and laugh over my bones, _she thought fiercely. So, with one motion, she opened her satchel and flung her bread and dried meats every which way, impacting them into the trees.

“Feed it to your animals, because I’m done eating,” she called. She opened her two water sacks and poured what was left on the ground. “And I’m done drinking, too. Leave me to die on this spot if you want, but I’m not going any further until I get what I came for.” For good measure, she threw the empty sacks away, too, now bearing nothing but the cloak draped over her shoulders.

For a moment, there was nothing but the sound of her own breath. And then, a voice came from behind her, a voice she’d heard once before, filling the empty mouth of a vanishing woman on a disastrous wedding day.

“I wasn’t going to entertain this,” the voice said, “but you have given me an offering, however ill-meant. So, princess, let us talk.”


	6. Chapter 6

The god of the forest seemed old. Not because of how she looked, even though her face was lined like the older women Cygnie had known back at the castle, but because of how what happened when she moved. When Cygnie heard her speak, she turned, and the woman took a step towards her. When she walked, Cygnie heard the creaking of trees, and felt a stiff breeze. And when she had stopped, just a couple feet from Cygnie’s face, the forest grew up around her feet, and she settled as still as an oak tree.

She looked at Cygnie, with irises ringed like a tree stump, and said nothing. Cygnie looked at her eyes, and knew she was supposed to be kneeling, but she refused to start of this conversation with a concession. She nodded her head, the way should have to a courtier crossed in the hallway.

The god smiled, and Cygnie felt a stinging on her cheek. She slapped it away, and found a wasp perched on her hand. It sat for a moment and then floated away, nestling in the forest god’s hair.

“Well met, Roadmaker,” Cygnie said. “I’m here to find a way to break the curse upon my brothers.”

“It’s not that I don’t appreciate your spirit,” the woman said. “But that’s your first mistake, thinking it’s a curse that can be broken. It’s a payment, and the act’s been done.” She began to lean a shoulder, as though she was going to turn and leave, and Cygnie felt a sudden desperation. She hadn’t considered that the god was just refuse to talk to her once she’d already shown herself.

“Wait,” she said, “but how can it be payment if none of them agreed to pay it? That’s not fair.”

The god laughed. “Fair is a human concept, much younger than me,” she said. “But since you’ve come this far, I will indulge you and give you the story your father has clearly failed to.” She raised her left hand, and a small bush sprang out of the ground, growing itself into the shape of a chair. “Have a seat.”

Cygnie sat. The god brought her right hand to her lips, and blew. A cloud of pollen scattered out on her breath and swirled through the air until it formed into the figure of her father, leading a horse, batting at branches and clearly lost in the woods.

“He came through my forest once, and I let him pass,” the god said. “But when he came back through, emboldened by his son’s success in the south, he was bragging to his new daughter-in-law how his people had built the road of their own accord, and that there used to be other ways through the forest. So I showed him one. Now watch.”

As the ghostly figure of her father stumbled, another formed beside him. It was the woman he had brought back from the forest, and as Cygnie watched, she heard their voices, echoing through the trees.

“You’re lost,” the woman said. “I can show you the way back.”

Her father started. “Who are you?”

She smiled. “I have lived here a short time, but I know the way out.”

He looked afraid. Cygnie had never seen her father afraid. “You belong to her, don’t you. That witch is trying to trick me, and I won’t listen.”

“She calls me her daughter, yes. But if I don’t help you, there’s no other way out. She’s made sure of that.”

Her father ceased hacking at the foliage around him. “Are you sure?”

Her smile had hardened in her face. “I’m sure. Leave with me, or not at all.”

He sighed. “I went off to look at this separate path, thinking that it was what my wife had done. My sons are still on the road. Are they alright?”

“They are fine. If you do not return, they will eventually leave without you. They will be without a father, but they will be safe. If you let me lead you, I will take you back to them, and you will all leave together, and payment will be rendered unto all of you.”

“I knew you would want payment for this service.”

She extended a hand to him. “Only your hand in marriage, sir. Only to rule your household alongside you.”

Cygnie watched her father take his hand and be led back to the road. Then the pollen collapsed, leaving a sticky carpet on the forest floor.

“You see,” the god said from beside Cygnie, bringing her back to the present, “he was offered the choice of leaving his children safe or leaving together. He chose together, just as she chose to grant his wedding wish.”

Cygnie saw no change in the god’s countenance when she looked at her. She couldn’t tell if these memories brought feelings of triumph, or relief, or contentment. She also couldn’t see how the lack of promise that a man’s children would be safe could ever translate into the certainty that they would be turned into birds, but the forest god’s view of justice was so clearly off from her own that she didn’t know how to start with that. Instead, she asked, “was she really your daughter?”

The forest god’s finger twitched, and a ripple of breeze ran through the leaves above. Cygnie wondered if it was her version of a shrug. “I’ve had many such daughters. I can’t leave the forest, so every so often I shape a sunbeam into a person and send her out for me. They don’t last.”

When Cygnie didn’t answer right away, the forest god’s voice became amused. “Is that your only question, girl? You came in with so much fury.”

“I’m still furious,” Cygnie said, calmly, slowly, trying to buy herself time to think, “but I’m trying to decide how to speak it.”

The god chuckled. “You know, you think so much about your mother, but you’re nothing like her.”

Cygnie’s head snapped up again, and the god fully laughed. “I thought that would get your attention. Would you like me to tell you how?”

“I don’t need to hear about my mother from her murderer.”

“Murderer! I thought I already told you, your human laws have nothing to do with me here. Besides, I didn’t kill your mother. How could I kill someone who refused to admit I existed?”

“Your mother was the most stubborn human I’ve ever met, and I’ve met a fair few. She didn’t just insist everything she thought was right, she _knew _it, with the kind of roots you can’t dislodge. When she came through my forest, I meant to humiliate her, to show her what kind of power she’d been trifling with. But she wouldn’t be led off the path, no matter how tempting I made it. Finally, when I’d grown enough vines and branches over the road to scare a dozen men, a guard started chattering about me. Your mother turned on him and ordered him off of his horse. ‘There is nothing in these woods but the demons we imagine ourselves,’ she said. ‘If you all are so scared of the road, I will lead us out of here through the trees on foot.’ And she led them off the road.

“One of your parents called me a demon, the other a witch. I don’t appreciate either term. I’m not like the demons of the west or the witches of the east. I am the forest, and I’ve been here ever since the first seed landed on the ground.”

For the first time, the forest god seemed angry – but as she settled back into her story, it faded again.

“Of course, they eventually separated from each other as they became more and more confused. You know how that felt.”

Unconsciously, Cygnie found herself nodding.

“The soldiers I did nothing to. If they’d had the strength of will, they could have found their own way out and lived. But they’d chosen to follow her, and without her, they were lost.

“The boy was the last to leave her side. I underestimated him, I admit. He was so determined to follow her. I think he knew that I would eventually reveal myself to her, and maybe he thought he could throw himself on the ground and beg for clemency. But my eyes were full of your mother, and I had no time for that. Eventually, I opened a path to him, but as he left, he caught a glimpse of me as I watched your mother. I still don’t know how he managed that, and I didn’t realize what he’d taken until he’d gone.” The forest god shifted her head, and Cygnie saw how all of her hair was underlaid with leaves. She brushed her fingers over the one pinned to her cloak.

“Yes. You can keep that. It’s a clever trick, taking something of mine. If you carry that with you, you maintain the smallest of connections to this forest, and it’s a bit easier to find your way back. The birds weren’t all my doing, you know. They were drawn to that.

“So. I had meant to confront your mother, but the more I listened to her, the more I realized that even seeing me as I am would do nothing. So I sent another of my daughters to offer her a choice.”

“A way out, in exchange for payment?”

“Not even that. An offer to tell her the way out, no payment necessary. Can you guess what happened?”

Cygnie didn’t say anything. She didn’t want to.

“Don’t sulk. Your parents would say it’s unbecoming. She refused, of course. The only price was accepting she needed help, that her way out was not working, and she wouldn’t do it. So my daughter dissolved, and your mother was left to find her own way out. She didn’t, of course.

“Those are your parents, Cygnette. A father who was too selfish to let his children live safely without him, and a mother who was too selfish to admit she was wrong.”

“I still don’t understand,” Cygnie said after a moment. She had to focus on the part of the forest god’s story she could grasp hold of, argue with. She couldn’t think too hard about her mother or she would fall apart. “I see how you aimed to turn my parents’ vices against them. But I don’t understand why you would render your punishment upon my brothers.”

The forest god laughed, and it was a harsh sound. “You’re still thinking that I care for how you humans matter to each other. Your parents turned all of their people against me, sought to drive me out of my own land. They tried to take everything from me, so I took everything from them. Besides, they used your brothers to turn over my altar, and in that act, the children became complicit.”

The worst part was, the more she talked, the more Cygnie remembered the scenes from her own childhood. She’d seen her brothers push over the altar. How many times had her mother told Cygnie that she was protecting her children from the superstition surrounding the forest god? And yet here they were. The more the forest god talked, the more Cygnie started to understand how she saw what Cygnie’s parents had done, and how their children would be fair game.

“Do you have any more questions, or are you ready to leave?” The forest god asked. “I’ve shown you what I meant to, and you must realize by now that I’m not going to grant your boon.”

“I know you won’t grant it as a boon,” Cygnie said, “but I’d like to pay for it.”

“What makes you think I’ll accept your payment? The forgotten daughter of your parents, who wronged me so? Why would I make any deal with you?”

“Because I don’t belong to my parents, or their land, just as your daughters aren’t tied to yours.”

The forest god stared at Cygnie, and for the first time, she looked genuinely surprised. Then she raised a hand and trailed one finger over Cygnie’s shoulder, almost as if making sure she was real. Her finger left behind a mark of the pollen. “I’ve not met many humans, princess, but most of them wouldn’t be so quick to renounce the land of their birth.”

Cygnie swept the pollen from her clothes. She was thinking of nothing but her father’s face at the window, so many days ago now. “I know what I was meant for, and that isn’t possible anymore. Let me pay you for my brothers’ human lives. In my blood, or my life, or whatever payment you take. Surely one of me is worth six of them.”

“I wouldn’t be so quick to throw your own worth away,” the forest god said. But she stood up, and as she moved, vines broke through the dirt in waves. “And yet, if this is what you really want, Princess, I will tell you.” She spread her arms wide, and Cygnie was hit with a gust of wind. Instinctively, she put her hands before her face and squeezed her eyes closed as her hair was whipped about her and debris battered at her arms.

The wind ceased just as suddenly as it began. Cygnie opened her eyes, and the forest had changed. Where before they had been nestled in a small gap in the trees, now she stood in an open clearing, encircled by a ring of trees forming unnatural symmetry.

The Forestborn stood before her, beside a small pool, clear as glass and without a ripple upon it. It was surrounded by nettles, overgrown and lush. The God of the Forest herself was taller, sturdier. Her feet had been rooted to the floor before, but now vines ran all the way up her calves and hung from her shoulders, and her hair was fitted with a crown of thorns.

“What I did to your brothers wasn’t a curse,” the god said, her voice now as sonorous as if it came across a great lake, “but it was rooted in the magic of this place, just as the remedy must be. Choose your method, Princess. You won’t be given a second choice.”

Cygnie knew she was being tested, but she felt nothing but calm as she surveyed the grove. It was almost impossible not to; there was a slight breeze roaming through, and she could smell water and pine sap on the air, and every once in a while a bird called from far away.

“You haven’t got all day, you know,” the forest god said, and Cygnie’s eyes snapped open. She didn’t know when they had closed. She blushed. This place was just as distracting as wandering the forest had been. She forced herself to look around, try to figure out what she was supposed to do. Her eyes settled on the nettles growing at the water’s edge. Almost before she realized what she was doing, she had crossed to the pool, and pulled up on of the nettles by the root. It came out from the soil easily in her hand.

“I’ll make them shirts,” she said. “To reverse what yours did. Out of these.”

The forest god’s face quirked, and a dragonfly hovered around Cygnie’s face. “You realize what that will do to them, using those,” she said.

“If the feathers came from swans, and the feathers made them into swans, this will tie them to this place, to you.” Cygnie was talking faster than she could think. “I know they may not be the same. But I don’t think you could claim them totally. They’re too human, and it’s my own blood and time that will go into weaving these nettles together. And you just said you’d give me a chance to free them. You never said you wouldn’t come after them again. How do I know you won’t approach my oldest brother next, with a daughter made of sunlight? But I don’t think you could do that if something of what they were was woven into you.”

She was breathing a little harder than usual, when she finished, but she was still clutching the nettles, and as she looked at the forest god’s face, she knew she had won.

“I said you weren’t much like your mother, and I was right,” the god said finally. “She thought she knew everything and really knew nothing. You think you’re worth nothing, but really – well. We’ll see how you do.”

She pointed, and Cygnie heard the trees creak behind her. She looked back, and a path had opened through the forest.

“You won’t be lost again if you follow this path,” the god said. “Be advised, only the nettles from the forest will work for your purpose, so you will want to stay close. They all have the same roots.”

Cygnie swallowed. “And my payment?”

The god smiled, and her teeth glittered like mica. “Your voice, I think. From the moment you begin sewing until you bestow those shirts on your brothers, you must not say a word.”

“I’ll succeed,” Cygnie said. “I’ll bring them back.”

“I have no doubt you will.”

Cygnie turned to go down the path and out of the forest, the enormity of the task in front of her just starting to sink in. As she took a step forward and her foot sank into a bed of moss, she heard the forest god’s final words.

“I’ll be watching you, Princess. I’m invested in you now. Don’t forget that.”


	7. Chapter 7

All her childhood, she heard stories of demons.

Demons were everywhere in that country. The lands to the far east had the old legends of witches roaming the countryside, and the country to the near east had the old superstitions about their forest god, but here in the west there were demons. Demons who lived in the fields and brought the rains; these typically left you alone if you didn’t mind a small portion of your harvest disappearing every year. Demons who lived in the kitchen and raised the bread; these were appeased with table scraps and fresh milk. Demons who lived in the shadows and shaped the light; these mostly just had to be ignored, for they loved nothing more than the opportunity to make a little mischief. Every child was raised on rules regarding the demons. Appease this one, praise that one, ignore the other. “Every demon has its need,” the saying went, and as long as you knew what that need was, demons were just a part of daily life.

It was only the demons under the ground, those cursed to be forever undead, who were meant to be feared, for the only thing they needed was human life, and that could not be given lightly.

Yes, every child was raised on stories of demons. But for Princess Saltaire, the stories were special, because her soul belonged to one of the demons under the ground, and from the time she knew what that meant, she was determined to get it back.

Princess Cygnette would not have known this, but the same year she was born, the King and Queen in the vast country to the west were also blessed with a child. They were young. King Irien had just been crowned a few months prior, and he saw his son as a demon-given sign of a successful and powerful reign.

The little boy was taken ill and died just a scant few months later.

_It was just a childhood fever,_ the court whispered. _Fate is cruel that way. Never thought it would happen to the highest among us_.

The King and Queen were both devastated, but for King Irien, any chance of happiness he had been destroyed with his son’s life. The King was not a scholarly man, but he was a religious one, and when the funeral for the infant Prince was over, he summoned all of the wisest masters of demonology in his realm and asked them how to raise the Lord of the Frost.

The Lord of the Frost was ruler of the underground demons. The people told their children that he was the only underground demon who’d ever come close to breaking out and walking among the living. They said that every year, when the frosts first moved across the ground, he was trying again to live on the breathing surface of the world.

Everyone knew there was no way to raise someone from the dead. If demons knew how, even the most powerful and nefarious among them wouldn’t tell you. But everyone also knew that if a demon, especially one as powerful as the Lord of the Frost, granted someone their protection, there was little harm that could come to them. Such protection usually came at a price, but one that desperate men were willing to pay.

Saltaire was the fifth daughter, born ten years after her ill-fated older brother. Her mother would become the second wife her father divorced, after Sal’s sister Descha was born, and two more women would follow after, each given up after the birth of three daughters. Sal never knew why three attempts to produce a living son was the number her father had settled on as the breaking point, but it never failed. His first wife, Vasia, was cast off after the birth of her second daughter, and maybe the pattern had just stuck. Only his second wife hadn’t had to fail, dying when her first daughter was just a baby.

Once, when Sal was thirteen, she tied a scarf over her face and stole a cloak from the guardroom, sneaking into the city at midday. She was meant to be napping, and she would pay for the lack of sleep later, but she wanted to see her hometown without a phalanx of sisters, a stern set of guards, and a citizenry afraid to look at her.

After a couple hours of happy wandering, she found a tavern where those without anything else to do were listening to a storyteller. It was the kind of storytelling where everyone had been drinking, and there was more artistry being put into the crowd’s comments than the story itself, but they all seemed to be having a good time. Sal drew herself into a corner, hood still hanging low over her face. She was tall for her age, and found that if she didn’t say anything and didn’t let anyone close enough to see her eyes, she could move about unnoticed.

After only a few words, she realized that the storytelling must have been telling the story of her family. One everyone knew, but one they never tired of repeating to each other. The storyteller was just finished describing how the King had summoned all the wisest men and women in the country to advise him on his quest to bring his son back, and how no one outside the castle knew what he did, but it had clearly been powerful magic.

“You storytellers always say the King did something big,” one man in the audience called, “but you never say what it was. From where I’m sitting, we’re almost twenty years later and the man has only daughters, so he must have cursed himself pretty good, or else he’s spread this rubbish story about magic to cover up the failure of his manhood.”

Some around him laughed, but the storyteller held up a hand. “No one knows exactly what the King did,” he said, “but I’ve got something the other bards don’t. I have two pieces of information that, when put together, I think you’ll agree make it clear that the King made a deal with a demon.”

The crowd quieted.

“Now, I don’t know how much all of you know about the study of demonology,” the storyteller went on, “but there are two schools of thought. The old style, which our forebearers practiced, held that any attempts to work or even speak directly with demons would always lead to ill. This idea is why we were taught for so long to keep our heads down, leave our offerings, and keep ourselves apart from the demons as much as we can. The most revered scholar of this school, the conservatives, is a man named Numeren.

“But over the past couple decades, a new position has arisen within the academic community. At the time of the King’s grief, this study was just in its infancy, and the leader was a man named Denomar. Denomar was young and bold, and he was the leader of a group who called themselves the Free Magicians. They believed that humans could not only learn to speak with demons in a way that was safe, but that deals with demons were a valid pathway to power. A few among their movement believed that magic itself could be freed from the grasp of demons only, and that humans could learn to work it themselves.”

The crowd was truly silent now. Even Sal, who thought she knew how this story ended, found herself leaning forward.

“As I said,” the storyteller continued, “no one knows exactly what happened when the King summoned all those wise men to his side. But what I do know is that, shortly after, Numeran, who had been a constant presence at court until then, stormed out, and has not been seen at the King’s side since. He now lives in seclusion in the academician’s hall, across the city. And Denomar has been a constant fixture in the court for the last seventeen years.”

Sal knew Denomar as a terrifyingly calm man, one she’d been obliged to greet politely at feasts, and as an advisor her father had called on less and less as she’d grown up. She’d never realized he had been instrumental in the circumstances that had led to her birth, but of course it made sense.

“You said there were two reasons,” another onlooker said after a moment. “What is the other one?”

The storyteller smiled, seemingly pleased to have won the crowd over so completely. “Well, this is just hearsay, I can’t say for sure,” he warned. “But I have it from a very trusted source, a former castle gardener, that those princesses have something very strange about their eyes. That the King doesn’t show them off because he knows we’ll all realize that they’re demon-claimed.”

The crowd erupted in a flurry of whispers and accolades, and the storyteller graciously accepted coins and beer as the pressed even closer to him, clamoring for more details. Sal shoved her way past all of them, and didn’t stop moving until she’d slipped back inside the castle walls. She dropped her discarded cloak and scarf in a random hallway, crept through the rooms where her sisters were just starting to wake up, and shut herself in the washroom. Leaning so close to the mirror that her nose was almost touching it, she studied her eyes again, something she’d done over and over as she’d grown up.

There were a lot of stories about people who made unfortunate deals with demons, and while many of them were almost certainly made up, and the details for how one did such a thing varied widely, there was one fact every sing one agreed on. Those with souled who belonged to a demon had a thick ring around their irises, giving them eyes that were impossible to miss when seen up close. Some of the stories made them sound almost attractive, with those who had traded their souls for guaranteed rain having rings of a shining gray, or those who had wanted healthy-growing crops having rings of brilliant green.

Sal’s eyes – they naturally a quiet brown, like her mother’s – were encircled by a mark of pure purple, unquestionably unnatural and impossible to hide. She’d had them since the day she was born. All her sisters had. It signified a relationship with something under the ground, something evil.

It was true that the scholars never told anyone exactly what magic they performed for King Irien that allowed him to converse with the demon. But as Princess Saltaire had been raised to know, the King had in fact made a deal with the demon. In exchange for the protection of his future sons, the King of the Frost would have a nighttime stake in the souls of his future daughters.


	8. Chapter 8

Sal couldn’t stop thinking about the storyteller’s tale. Every time she caught a glimpse of her own eyes in the mirror, and every time she and her sisters were dressing for the night, she thought back to his words. She’d always known what her father had done, but when her mothers and sisters passed along that story, it had always felt so inevitable. By the time she was born, she was the fifth daughter to inherit their curse, and though there had always been an explanation of _why_ – spoken with bitterness by her mother, with resignation by her sisters – there had never been an explanation of _how_. She had been living under this thing her whole life, and she had no idea how her father had really done it. But more importantly, she didn’t know how she might begin to break out of it.

So, at thirteen, she made it her mission to find out. She would be the daughter who figured it out, who freed all of them. She knew she would.

She began in the library. She planned to seek out the help of a real magician eventually, but first she figured she could teach herself everything there was to learn about magic on her own. She skipped the midday naps for weeks; dark circles sprang up under her eyes, and her older sisters chided her, but they left her alone. Sal overheard Angella, the oldest, telling Melandra, who was barely twenty at the time, that they had all had a rebellious phase at one time and it was best to let Sal get it out of her system. Sal bristled at the words, but as she followed her sisters into the dark that night, the worst spikes of her emotions were wiped away. That was always how it was.

The castle librarians left her alone as she scoured, first the demonology section, and then the folklore section, and then the annals describing the history of the study of magic itself. Everyone did their best to ignore the princesses inside the castle, especially the young ones, and for the most part the princesses ignored them back. Sal’s sister Katrionicia, who was two years older, was the only who’d tried to muscle herself into a position at court with any actual responsibilities. The others spent their time in the garden, or looking after the babies, or in the library.

By reading a couple hours a day, Sal had made it through everything their library had to offer in about a month. The demonology section seemed especially scant, considering that several scholars lived at court and Sal assumed they would have wanted to bring some of their books with them rather than heading across the city to the academy all the time. But when she finally inquired with one of the librarians about this, she didn’t get the answer she hoped.

“I believe your father has some of those books in his personal collection, my Lady,” the librarian said, not meeting Sal’s eyes.

So that was a dead end. Sal didn’t speak to her father unless she was required to, and she certainly didn’t seek him out. None of her sisters did. She was just going to have to move on to the next stage of her plan.

That part of it required asking Tempora for help. Tempora was eighteen. Sal’s three oldest sisters – Angella, Melandra, and Tempora – had all received the most education, because they were born and the plans made before their father had quite given up, and because the King’s first wife still lived at court and had seen to it. As a result, they had the best handwriting. They all probably would have helped Sal if she had asked enough, but she picked Tempora because she was least likely to give her a lecture while doing it.

A few days later, Sal snuck out of the castle a midday again. She had her face hooded again, but when she got to the entrance to the academic halls, she let the hood fall back. There was no way she was going to be able to hide her eyes when asking directly for entrance to the library, but if her plan worked out, that shouldn’t be a problem.

It took her a few tries to find the library itself, but eventually she made her way to a big open room. Shelves of books towered up to the ceiling, and it didn’t take long for Sal to locate a librarian, seated at a large desk.

“Hello,” Sal said. “Could you point me to the section on demonology?”

The librarian glanced up and then stared. Sal let him look for a few seconds, and then smiled as nicely as she could manage. The kind of smile she was meant to use on the rare occasion that visiting dignitaries actually came to the castle.

“I’m sorry,” the librarian finally said, “do you have a credential?”

Sal didn’t know exactly how study at the academy worked, but had figured there would be a credential of some kind required, so was almost pleased to see that she’d guessed right. She whipped out the piece of paper Tempora had given her the previous day.

“Here,” she said, still using her court voice. “Will this do?”

It was a short letter, apparently signed by the King himself, granting his daughter Princess Saltaire access to the academician’s library. Sal watched the librarian glance back and forth between her eyes and the letter multiple times, as their full implication seemed to hit him. Then he looked at the to his left, where a signed proclamation from the King hung framed, certifying the library to continue serving his citizens for another five years. Sal held her breath, but Tempora must have done a good enough job at copying his signature, because the librarian eventually handed her the letter back and pointed to the back right corner of the room.

It took two weeks of Sal’s noontime excursions to the academy library for word of what she was doing to get back to the court, and another four days for it to get through the court and to her father. By that time, Sal had scoured most of the basic books at that library and realized many of them just duplicated what she’d already learned.

The only things known about demons were those things which could be learned through observation, as no one had ever managed to capture and examine one (or, no one had ever tried). The power of a demon came from its domain. If you could trick a demon of the kitchen, for example, into talking to you in the stable yard, it would be less likely to be able to hold on to your soul. Or if you could identify an object particularly sacred to the demon and steal it, you could make a good bargain to give it back. A few brave souls had even managed to give a demon poisoned or tainted offerings and gained power over them that way.

But the number of people who’d managed to outsmart a demon like that was very few. Most people who tangled with demons, Sal observed, were simply white-knuckling their way through the arrangement, trying to get the best deal possible through sheer force of will or resigning themselves to coping with the consequences.

As for humans managing magic directly, well, the Free Magicians had produced a few papers over the past several years triumphantly proclaiming feats of magic by humans. But as Sal read into them more, she realized that most of the people had been able to do so through the same old tricks. One boy had made himself fabulously wealthy by producing golden eggs, but it was later revealed that he had simply stolen the goose from a sky demon. Another farmer had raised himself to fabulous success through the help of a demon in the guise of a cat that had taken a liking to him. Even as she read story after story, Sal couldn’t find a single example of a human performing magic alone that wasn’t eventually traced to a stolen magic item, or an intervention from a friendly demon, or an answered plea.

And by the time she had gotten through all of these stories, and was thinking of perhaps more unorthodox places she could look, she was paid a visit by her father.

Sal’s least favorite time of day was just before the sun began to set. The court always dined early, in the last hours of the afternoon, and the princesses began preparing for their nighttime haunt when the sun started setting. But if dinner ended early enough, those intervening hours became a landmine, because they were the time that their father or another member of the court was most likely to seek them out.

It didn’t happen very often. Most members of the court were too aloof or too uncomfortable to socialize with the princesses as a group, and months would go by between visits from their father. But when he did show up, it was nearly always because of something important, and something important usually meant something bad.

Sal still remembered the time he had arrived in their rooms to announce the start of the contest. She was nine years old, and there were only nine princesses. She hadn’t put on her dress yet, but Angella had been braiding her hair. Every once in a while she accidentally tugged too hard, but Sal didn’t complain. She was young enough still that her oldest sisters seemed almost magical in their poise and adulthood, and there were already four sisters younger than her. Sal loved her younger sisters, but as they grew in number, she felt sometimes like she had to compete with them for attention.

When their father was angry, he filled their rooms like a stormcloud, but on this night he’d entered quietly, like a moonbeam through a window. Sal didn’t see him at first, but then she looked up when Angella’s fingers tightened in her hair.

“I have good news,” King Irien said.

“What is it?” Melandra asked immediately. Melandra had always been like that, trying to speed through every interaction with their father, pushing him to get to the point and leave.

He smiled. “I’ve put out a notice, a proclamation. Some of you are growing up, now.” He nodded at Angella, who was just eighteen at the time. “It’s time for you to be married, but for obvious reasons, that can’t happen quite yet.”

“Couldn’t the men just come live with us here?” Descha, who was only seven, asked. Melandra shushed her and their father continued speaking without acknowledging it.

“I’ve made a proclamation about my house full of unmarried daughters. Any man, no matter his status – whether he be a noble, a soldier, or a farmboy – any man who spends a night here and discovers why your dancing shoes are worn out every morning may have the choice of one of your hands in marriage.”

There was a silence. Sal tapped on Angella’s knee, trying to tell her that she was pulling her hair without saying anything. Angella’s grip loosened slightly, and in another moment, she said, “but any of them figuring out where we go wouldn’t change anything.”

“I know,” he said. His voice was still calm. It sounded like he was trying to be soothing. “None of them will succeed. When they’re waiting for you all to go to sleep, before you leave, you’ll give them a drink to relax, and you’ll slip a sleeping drug in it. I’ll have several rounds delivered to you.”

“What if they don’t drink it?” Tempora asked. “Surely the kingdom’s boldest men wouldn’t be so foolish.” Sal could tell she was being sarcastic, but their father nodded and answered as smoothly as if she’d been serious.

“I have every confidence in my daughters to ensure that their guests accept their hospitality. It would be rude of them not to accept your offerings.”

“Why even bother announcing it, if we’re going to drug them?” Angella said. Her voice was so flat, it was barely a question.

King Irien smiled again. “Everyone’s been asking why none of you have been married yet, or even promised to anyone. This will get them off all of our backs, and give the country a bit of a mystery to chew over. I thought you would be pleased – you get to continue living here as you have been, and all that changes is you’ll get a few occasional guests.”

It hadn’t been a few guests, nor had they been occasional. In the first two years after the King’s proclamation, the court had been flooded with men trying their luck at the riddle. For a time, Sal and all her sisters got so used to hiding drugs in drinks that they could have done so in the middle of a crowded feast.

But the deluge had slowed, and now that Sal was thirteen, it had been months since they’d had a visitor. And as a consequence, it had been ages since they’d heard from their father. But here he was, now, storming into their rooms after dinner and pointing a finger at Sal.

“It has come to my attention,” he said, voice crackling like the air just before a lightning blast, “that one of you has been taking herself across the city during the day, and claiming she has my permission to do so.”

Sal lifted her chin. She’d known this was coming, and had decided there was no point in trying to deny what she’d done. And she thought she knew more now about the stakes of what her father had done, all those years ago. A small part of her hoped he would appreciate her boldness in taking action to free all of them from the curse.

But her father’s pointed finger relaxed, and he dismissed her with a wave of his hand. “Saltaire. I’m disappointed, and you will be confined to this room for the next two weeks, the same amount of time over again that you’ve been sneaking out. But, really, I’m more dismayed that you could even do this at all.” He turned his gaze on Sal’s older sisters. “Those of you who know better – I’m shocked that you let her get away with this. All of you are supposed to be looking after your younger sisters, and keeping them from harm. That’s how this family is supposed to work, and when you let one of them down, you let the whole family down.”

“How do you-“ Tempora started, face flushed, but Melandra gripped her arm and she stopped talking. Their father watched her a moment more, and then nodded when she said nothing further.

“I see you all understand. Good. Now. I expect no more such mistakes. I will see most of you tomorrow at breakfast, and Saltaire, I will see you in two weeks.”

Now that she’d gone through the whole castle library and been banned from the academician’s hall, Sal had no other choice but to turn to her final option. She spent her two weeks shut away going over all of her notes and writing down all the theories she’d managed to come up with, and then when she was free to move about the castle again, she steeled herself to go see Denomar.

She spent a couple days figuring out the man’s schedule. Fortunately for Sal, he tended to keep to himself in his study in the hours right after breakfast, before Sal was supposed to be sleeping. After all of that time studying, she’d gotten used to going without her midday nap, but two weeks stuck in her rooms had brought the habit right back. So one day, after breakfast, she pinned her hair up as if she’d been attending a banquet, and knocked on the magician’s door.

Denomar had a funny position at court. After Sal had heard the storyteller in the tavern, she’d been trying to figure out more about it. The court did have a tradition of keeping a resident demonologist, but Sal couldn’t remember Denomar ever having been called upon to consult on any matters of demons in her lifetime. He had a very nice set of chambers, in the section of the castle where all the King’s most respected advisors lived, and he had been granted a title and a small estate several years back, but he was only summoned to attend the King in his audience chambers every couple weeks, and Sal and her sisters rarely saw them in close conversation.

Sal felt fortunate that Denomar didn’t have an assistant. When she knocked, there was a long pause before the man answered. Sal had always been a little frightened of him, because he was so tall and so quiet, but she’d mostly seen him seated at the high table at feasts and behind her father in the audience chamber. She was relieved to find that he looked less terrifying when framed by a doorway, a quill clutched in one hand.

He took a minute to focus on her, and when he did so, he looked incredibly surprised. “Can I help you, princess?”

Sal wouldn’t have been surprised if he couldn’t remember her name. “I need to ask you some questions about magic,” she said.

His face snapped closed, going from surprise to disinterest. “I’m sure I can’t help you. Try the library, or I’m sure your father can hire a tutor if you’re interested in history. Now, I’m busy.”

He moved to close the door, and Sal forced her next works to come out as fast as they could. “I want to become a Free Magician.”

He stopped, and looked at her again. “What have you been reading, little girl?”

“Everything I could find,” she said. “I went through everything I could in our library, and then I went through everything I could get to in the academy before my father found out. I know that you had something to do with our father’s contract with the Lord of the Frost-“

“Stop talking,” Denomar hissed, flinging the door further open and glancing furiously up and down the hall. He moved a hand as though to pull her into the room, but thought better of it and gestured at the inside instead. “Come in, my Lady,” he said. He added the title belatedly.

Sal followed him inside. She’d thought his study would be covered in books, but it wasn’t. Instead of bookshelves, paper covered with strange symbols and scrawling writing were pasted all over the walls. Denomar flung and hand wildly at a small couch, which was also carpeted in paper. Sal gingerly set some of it aside and perched on the edge. Denomar shut the door and turned to face her.

“So. Who have you been talking to?”

“I haven’t been talking to anyone. I’ve been reading, and I’ve decided to try and break the curse on my sisters. I know you’re the leader of the Free Magic movement.”

Denomar snorted. “Are they still calling it a movement,” he muttered under his breath.

“So, I’ve come here to find out what you know that could help me,” Sal continued, ignoring his interruption and putting all of the pride she could muster into her voice.

“You can’t do it, princess,” Denomar said. “It can’t be done. Not by me, and certainly not by you.”

“It’s Princess Saltaire,” Sal responded, “and you can’t say that when I haven’t even tried.”

“How old are you? Twelve?”

“Thirteen.”

He sighed. “_I’ve _tried, alright? Every time one of you is born, he asks me to try again, and I spend weeks in here, locked away with texts I could recite with my eyes closed. If I haven’t been successful in twenty-two years, do you think you’ll be able to do anything?”

Truthfully, Sal was well aware that she really had no idea what she was getting herself into. But she had come this far, and there was no way she was going to give up and go back to her gilded, lonely rooms.

“I don’t know,” she said. “But I’ve been dancing for that monster every night since I could walk. I think I deserve to know everything there is to know about the spell we’re all under.”

Denomar sat down, heavily, at his desk chair. “I suppose,” he said, bitterly, “with how little your father calls on me these days, I can spare some time to teach his daughter demonology.” He met her eyes with his own. “You realize, of course, that this is a hopeless venture.”

“I’m committed.” And she was; Sal knew with every inch of her thirteen years that she wasn’t giving up on this, not ever.

“Alright. Come back tomorrow, after breakfast, and I’ll tell you what happened before you were born.”


	9. Chapter 9

The first few weeks without words were the hardest.

The forest god’s path had led her outside of the trees. The whole time she was walking the path, Cygnie thought she would be going home. She pictured arriving back at the castle, and somehow telling her father what she’d managed to do, and then keeping herself to her rooms and working night and day on the shirts.

When she first saw the unobstructed sky again, she felt a swelling of relief, and for a moment the castle walls and the views and people she’d known her whole life seemed just steps away. But then the nettles she was clutching stung her hand, and as soon as she looked down at them, her new reality came rushing back in.

She couldn’t go back home. She couldn’t even leave the forest, really. It wasn’t just that it would be easier to harvest the nettles if she lived where they grew; it was that, as she looked at them, she couldn’t possibly imagine trying to explain what she was going to spend the next several years doing. And it would be years, she was sure. Sewing shirts out of nettles – she wasn’t even sure where to start.

She ended up walking the bounds of the forest that evening, and all of the next day. Staying just out of the shadows of the trees, with no idea where she could possibly god, just walking and walking.

When she’d walked as much as she thought she could, on the evening of her second day after speaking with the forest god, she finally sat down and leaned against an oak tree. She knew she was back under the forest’s canopy, just barely, but she closed her eyes anyway, almost not caring if she opened them and she was back in that labyrinthine forest again.

But that didn’t happen. When she opened them again, it was to a cool night breeze and the light of the first stars. She stumbled to her feet, meaning to carry on with her wandering, and her eyes caught on the corner of a rough-hewn cabin.

It hadn’t been there before, she was almost sure. Whether this was the work of the forest god again, playing one last joke, or some other malevolent creature, or just a hallucination, she couldn’t bring herself to care. She lurched towards it, locating the door, and fell through it. It was dark in there, but she felt around until she found a straw-stuffed mattress strewn across the floor, and collapsed onto it.

One month in, and Cygnie had made one trip to the town on the edge of the forest, where she sent a letter back to her home. She was terrified the whole way back to the cabin, sure she wouldn’t be able to find it again, but in the end it was easier than she thought. In the light of day, it was small, but well-built, with a single window cut into the front and a tiny stone fireplace.

Weeks later, Sebastian showed up, riding one horse and leading another. Without a word, he began to unpack the saddlebags, handing her first a thick notepad and a pencil.

_Thank you_, she wrote. _I didn’t know if you would be able to find it. _

“I just followed the edge of the forest, like you said,” he responded. Cygnie looked at his face and saw how much his eyes were darting to the trees and back, and as he went to tie up the horses, she thought his hands were trembling.

As she’d requested in her letter, Sebastian had brought her a bedroll, and a cookpot, and a small set of tools. Also, a multitude of needles and a handheld spindle.

They carried all of it into the cabin, and then Cygnie picked up the notepad again. _Did you tell my brothers where I am and what I’m doing?_

“Yes. They’ll be on their way here. They’re still trying to get the King to talk to them.”

_He won’t?_

Sebastian shook his head. Now that they were standing still, his fingers were twisting together and he was biting his lip.

_Thank you_, she wrote again. _You don’t have to stay here. I can see how uncomfortable you are here, and I’m going to be stuck here for a while. _

Sebastian looked at her, and then glanced at the side of the cabin, where she’d already begun planting nettles. Cygnie wondered if he felt pity at all the time she had rolling out in front of her. Or maybe he didn’t even believe that her plan was even real.

Cygnie waited, and then he shrugged. “I don’t have anywhere else to go,” he said, finally. “Your father dismissed me from my job, and I don’t have any other reason to stay in that castle.”

They got along for a few weeks, and then Cygnie got tired of not having anywhere to sit off the ground in the cabin. _Do you know how to make a table? _She asked Sebastian. _Or some chairs? _

“Out of what?”

_ Wood, what else?_

“From where?”

Cygnie frowned at him and waved at the forest behind them.

“I’m not going back in there. Not ever.”

_You don’t have to go into the forest proper. There’s lots of young trees around us. _

“No.”

Cygnie glared at him, tossed the notepad down onto her bed, and grabbed the axe on the way out of the cabin.

She marched towards the trees. Sebastian followed her at a lag, and when she first stepped under a shadow, he called out after her, warning her not to go in.

Cygnie turned back, and gestured furiously at him and then at the forest.

“_I’m _not going in,” he said, turning sulky, “and if you know what’s good for you, you won’t either, princess.”

Cygnie opened her mouth and silently screamed as hard as she could. No sound came out, but she kept at it until her throat ached anyway, looking Sebastian directly in the eye as she did so.

When she came back dragging a small tree, she dropped it in front of the house and headed straight inside. Taking the notepad off the bed, she scribbled on it and handed it to Sebastian without looking at him.

_I’m sorry. I know being here is hard for you. But you can’t talk to me like that when I can’t say anything back. _

“I’m sorry, too,” Sebastian said, quietly.

_I know it’s not your fault, but holding back words for so long has been driving me crazy. I feel like they’re crawling up my throat, and if I get upset, I’m just so afraid they’ll come spilling out, and it will all be for nothing. _

“I could write back.”

Cygnie’s eyes started watering. _No, I can’t ask you to do that. It’s just hard, hearing one side of a conversation all the time. If we were still in the castle with other people, I don’t think I would mind so much. _

She set the notepad down, and wiped at her eyes with the back of one hand. The motion pulled at the raw skin on her palms. She’d never tried to wield an axe before.

Sebastian went outside. Watching from the doorway, Cygnie saw him saddle up one of the horses. He came back inside, took a small amount of their little food supply, and picked up her notepad.

_I’ll be back in a week or so, _he wrote.

While he was gone, Cygnie found herself venturing further and further into the fringes of the forest. At first she simply kept the open sky within her sights, but then she started tying a string to a tree where she started and unwinding it along with her, following it back when she felt she’d gone far enough.

He’d brought seeds for the start of a vegetable garden, but she was looking for roots, berries, anything else they could count on to eat. She even tried to make a couple tiny traps for squirrels, but found she really had no idea how.

And wherever she went, she was looking for more nettles. She’d barely begun on the task ahead – having the cabin to outfit and survival to plan for had been such an easy distraction. But now that the days were quiet again, she turned her thoughts toward the real reason she was here.

By the time Sebastian returned, Cygnie had carved off sections of the tree she’d cut down. They were just chunks of wood, but she’d arranged them to serve as facsimiles of two stools and a tiny table. She’d set her sewing items on the table and sat for hours staring at it. She had realized at some point that, for the shirts to really work, they probably had to be made entirely of nettles, thread and all. She was sure that the forest god’s daughter had been locked away in her room spinning feathers into thread fine enough to bring her own shirts together. But how Cygnie was supposed to do that with the stems and leaves of nettles, she had no idea.

Ten days after Sebastian had left, she was shaken out of one of these reveries by the sound of hooves. Taking her notepad, she headed outside.

It was the same horse, but the saddlebags were bulging again – she assumed he’d bought another supply of food, though with what money she didn’t know – and it carried a second rider. Cygnie watched as first Sebastian and then the bride her oldest brother had brought back from the south, the young woman with the red hair like her own, dismounted.

Cygnie raised her hands, palms up, to Sebastian in an obvious question.

“Hello, Cygnie,” he said, and then looked flustered immediately. She didn’t think he’d ever used her nickname before.

Her sister-in-law – her name was Rosemary – stepped forward smoothly, almost as though they were being introduced at court again. “Hello,” she said, smiling. “Your brother told me what you’re going to do, and Sebastian said you needed another companion, so he came and got me.”

Six months in, and they’d fallen into a pattern. Sebastian, who had, after all, come into their lives because of his pumpkin-growing skills, was in charge of their burgeoning garden. When they actually started to produce some crops, he began taking the excess off to the nearest town and returning with bread and cheese and cloth. Even though Cygnie felt she should have been entitled to an income had she gone home and requested it, Sebastian and Rosemary had been too unsure to figure out how to take money from the castle, so they only had what Rosemary had had in her rooms at the time. They used it to buy a few chickens.

Rosemary declared herself unafraid of the forest early on. “I got through it once before, didn’t I?” she said, tossing her hair.

“So did I,” Sebastian said, “and I’m not going back in. But do what you want.”

“You need a fence,” Rosemary said, hoisting the axe over her shoulder. “And I want to learn how to use this.”

Cygnie hadn’t spoken to Rosemary much before the wedding, and she regretted that now, because she found she quite enjoyed her company. When Rosemary had first come to the castle, Cygnie had overheard one of the courtiers saying, “it’s so nice to have another southerner in the castle. It’s been too long since the Queen died.” At the time, the remark had stung. After all, Cygnie had her mother’s hair, and had been raised on her words – couldn’t she be enough of a reminder for them? But the more she watched Rosemary before the wedding, she realized they were right. The woman had an easy confidence about her that Cygnie had never been able to carry. She realized, also, that if her father took a liking to Rosemary, her older brother had handily secured the succession.

But that was then. Now, every time she looked at Rosemary, Cygnie couldn’t help but think of the forest god’s words, and notice that Rosemary, while she was plenty confident, didn’t have anything like her own mother’s solid-held opinions. Instead, she had a cheerfulness which was almost infectious. Cygnie smiled easier when Rosemary was around, and the few other times that Cygnie and Sebastian had tried to hold each other over the flames of their own frustrations, Rosemary was there to tell both of them to knock it off.

Sebastian had done well in bringing her back. And as every day went by, Cygnie appreciated that more and more, because with each inch she progressed on the shirts, she knew that she couldn’t have done it with just one other person hovering about. While Sebastian tended to the garden and the animals, and Rosemary took to the trees, Cygnie worked at her leaves and pricked her fingers dry.

Her brothers finally returned not long after Rosemary had constructed a strange and uneven fence, held together with rope Sebastian had bought in town. It was almost evening. Cygnie was seated outside of the house, and when she looked up, the sky was suddenly full of feathers. The swans settled nearby, curling into themselves on the ground several yards away. Cygnie and then Rosemary started towards them, but they looked at her plaintively and turned their backs. Alright, then. They could wait until dawn.

“It doesn’t look right, to see swans without water,” Sebastian whispered as the three of them crowded around their fire that night.

“I do hope they’ve been taking care of themselves, you’re right,” Rosemary said. She looked worried for the first time Cygnie had seen. She put a hand on Rosemary’s arm.

_I’m glad they’ve finally come_, she wrote. _We can only try to make them feel as welcome as we can. _

In the morning, she shook Rosemary and then Sebastian awake. Sebastian watched from the cabin’s door as she and Rosemary approached the swans and watched them turn back into boys. Each of them embraced Cygnie, and she sat with the other five of them as the oldest led Rosemary away for few brief minutes.

She learned that they had eventually managed to make their father talk to them, but when he did, it was stilted, and they came away from the encounter even more unhappy than they’d been. “All he would do was apologize,” one of them said. “He wouldn’t let us talk about anything else, or tell him what you were doing. Just kept saying he was sorry, that he didn’t know she would do that to us. We know he couldn’t have known. He didn’t need to keep saying it.”

Cygnie had debated all night whether to tell them about her full conversation with the god of the forest. She decided then on half of the truth. _That woman was a daughter of the forest god, she told me. I’m sure he feels guilty for bringing her there._

“Still,” another brother said, “it was so unhelpful. The same way he was after mom’s death.”

Cygnie had already known she wouldn’t be telling them the story about their mother.

They were just finished telling her about the lake they’d found nearby, where they’d always been within a short flight of her new home, when the time was up. Cygnie watched as a large swan led her sister-in-law back to the group. The swan tucked Cygnie’s hair behind her ear with its beak, and then all six of them took to the air and flew away.

Without a word, Rosemary walked into the forest. She didn’t even take the axe.

Sebastian cast a questioning look at Cygnie, who shrugged. Rosemary returned well after lunch. Her eyes were puffy and her cheeks were red. She was carrying an armful of nettles.

_You all don’t have to do that for me_, Cygnie scribbled at her. _We agreed_. They had. In the early days, Sebastian had tried to tend her nettle garden alongside his vegetables, and Rosemary had tried to add nettles to her foraging lists, but Cygnie had convinced them to stop, to let her carry her burden alone.

“We did,” Rosemary said, “but that was stupid. We’re all in this together, so I’m going to do everything I can to make it easier on you, Cygnie.”

“I don’t disagree,” Sebastian said, “but did something happen?” He gestured rather clumsily at her face.

“No,” Rosemary replied. “But I’m going into town tomorrow, and I expect to be gone for a few weeks.”

That evening, while Sebastian went off for a walk – they’d all agreed after a few cramped weeks that each of them had to try and get some alone time at least once a week – Cygnie sat down beside Rosemary on her bedroll and handed her the notepad.

_I thought it might be easier for you to not say it_, she had written.

Rosemary smiled at her, just a little. Then she took the notepad. _Thank you. _She lingered with the pencil over the paper for a moment, and then plunged it down, like taking a deep breath. _Your brother released me from our marriage today. _

_ I thought he might have. I’m sorry. _

_ It’s alright. _Cygnie suspected it wasn’t really; Rosemary was wiping at her eyes again. But she kept going. _We weren’t in love, not really. I liked his jokes and he liked my stories, and that was good enough. I wanted to travel. But now, when he told me that, I didn’t know what I was supposed to do anymore. I came to this country to marry him and maybe be a queen. But without him, why am I here? _She had to turn the page. _I’m sorry. _

Cygnie took the notepad back. _You were like this guiding light, sent out from home to represent your parents and build something new, and now you can’t do that. I understand. _

“That’s exactly it,” Rosemary said, sniffling a bit. “I know it’s a selfish thing to mourn over, after all that’s happened, and what you’re doing, but I can’t help it.”

_It’s what my father said to me, after the wedding. That was supposed to be their star, sent outward, and they couldn’t do that anymore, so what was the use of me?_

“That’s horrible.”

Cygnie shrugged. She was trying not to think of her father, these days. All she could see when she tried to picture him was the version of him she’d seen outlined in pollen.

Rosemary took the notepad back. _Anyway, I decided that if I can’t do what I was supposed to do, I can be here to help you. _

_ I’m grateful, but you should know that’s not your only option. _

_ I know. But I want to. So I’m going to go to town and buy some finished wood and see if someone will teach me some basic carpentry. You deserve a real table, not just a log. _

Cygnie felt warmed through. _Thank you, _she wrote. _That will help a good deal._

Rosemary was gone for longer than she’d said – over two months. Cygnie was harvesting nettles from behind the cabin when she heard Sebastian shouting for her. She found him grinning and waving at Rosemary, who was coming up the little road they’d started to wear down.

She had left with one of their horses, but she was leading a mule, pulling a small cart, with a goat tied behind it. When she reached them, Rosemary was beaming, and revealed the contents of the cart. In addition to the wood she’d promised, she’d brought back a butter churn.

“That horse bought a lot!” she said. “And I worked for the rest. Cygnie, I’m building you a table first, and then Sebastian is getting a fence that can actually stand up.”

As the three of them got the new animals settled, and she watched Rosemary set to work the next morning, Cygnie could almost forget why they were there. She had to shake herself and look at her shirts – one was about half done – and remind herself that they weren’t there to raise a farm. They were there just so she could harvest her nettles and bring her brothers back to the way they should be. Nothing more, nothing less.


	10. Chapter 10

By the time she was fifteen, Sal had been working on the magic for almost two years, and she had nothing to show for it.

Well, she knew a lot about demonology now. Denomar had been good to his word, even if his typical method was to hand her a book and let her read in silence for an hour. But he let her into his study every day, and begrudgingly answered most of her questions.

He insisted that she learn the “traditional” way, which first meant learning the nature and domains of all the demons men had thus far recorded. Sal thought this was strange for someone famous for breaking with tradition, but when she voiced this thought, she got a lecture on the importance of a solid foundation before experimentation. So she committed herself to going through pages and pages of catalogues of demons.

After that, there were what Denomar called the histories. They were like the folktales and legends Sal had been consuming on their own, but much drier. For every tall tale that got told enough times, a demonologist had gone out to record the story and try to sort out what could have actually happened, what was likely made up, and what categories the demons and demonic activities might belong to.

The categories had changed over time, but no matter the exact dichotomy, Sal could always place her father’s deal – and the current state of her soul – in the highest category. When she had finished the histories and mastered the terminology, she presented her findings to Denomar.

“It’s a demonic-human binding certification, subclass protection, with reciprocal nocturnal ownership relinquishment, subclass extra-temporal, meaning it won’t expire at a certain time.” In all her reading, Sal had only come across a couple others that were anything like it.

“Very good. And have you identified the typography for the second spell?”

“The second spell?”

Denomar smiled, but it looked pained. “Surely you don’t think your father’s having daughter after daughter was an accident, do you? The King of the Frost has done something to ensure that happens. Why else do you think he makes me try again every time another one of you is born?”

Sal stared at him. “So why does he keep trying?”

Denomar shrugged. “What else can he do? The man has a goal, and he’s determined to meet it.” When he saw how stiff Sal had become, his voice softened a little bit. “I don’t agree with any of his actions. But you deserved to know the full truth.”

Sal left Denomar’s office that day feeling coldly furious. As she rejoined her sisters and before they all fell asleep, she found Tempora. “Did you know our father is cursed to have only girls?” she hissed.

“No, but it doesn’t surprise me.”

“Doesn’t that make you angry? That he keeps marrying wives knowing what’s going to happen?”

“Of course, but I’ve been angry with him since I was little.”

When Sal tried telling her other sisters about what she’d learned, they reacted much the same way. All of them were horrified, but Tempora was right. They’d existed in that state of horror for all of their lives.

After she’d finished typifying her own curse, Sal reported back to Denomar’s office ready to start the real process of learning magic. Instead, Denomar met her with empty hands.

“I’ve given some thought to how I can help you,” he said. “Or rather, how you can help yourself, if you’re determined to pursue this.”

“You know I am.”

He nodded. “Yes. And I still don’t think it’s possible. But there are two those within my movement who have outlined the only two ways humans have been known to be able to change infernal contracts. The first is to find some kind of loophole, and beat the demon at his own game. Yours has been running for so many years that it seems to me that one of you would have discovered this by now. Still, I think the best course of action would be for you to sit down and map out the confines of what the deal does to you. What is the same, night after night, and how it makes you feel. Maybe if we have it down on paper we can discover something new.”

“I can do that,” Sal said.

“Good. Work on that over the next several days. Make sure to get every detail down.”

“What about the other method?”

He sighed. “It’s much more dangerous, as I know you’ve gathered from your reading. You could make a counter-deal with the Lord of the Frost, either negating the effects of your father’s arrangement or cancelling it out entirely. I have to say, I have no idea what would be both ethical _and _appealing to him, since soul shares are just about the most valuable thing a demon can want.”

“And it’s extra-temporal,” Sal added. “Even if I could free myself or my sisters, I probably couldn’t prevent the curse falling on any future sisters.”

He nodded again, and Sal thought he looked approving. “Precisely. Besides, most of the so-called counter-deals that have been catalogued are really just horse trading, where someone managed to steal a magical item or give themselves some other kind of protection and get the demon to leave them alone. I have never heard of anyone managing to remove a prior contract in favor of something entirely different.”

Sal thought she knew which stories he was talking about, and she couldn’t think of any, either. “Okay,” she said. “So we’ll hope the mapping helps, then?”

“Yes. That’s all I can come up with, I’m afraid.”

Sal turned to go, but wavered. “So, if the answer is just that I have to write down all of my experiences, why did you make me go through all of that reading and memorizing?”

Denomar looked confused. “You came to me for an education in demonology, so I gave you one. I’ve told your father before that he should be allowing you girls to do something during the day, to prepare you for the future, if marriage is out of the question. With the education I’ve given you, you could easily qualify for an intermediate placement at the academy when you’re a little older, if you wish.”

Sal was completely sure she had not been asking for an education in demonology, just a way out of her present life, but she took a moment to absorb his words. She hadn’t even begun to imagine having some kind of career outside of being her father’s trapped daughter, but the more she replayed his words in her mind, the more she liked it. Even as they’d gotten older, her sisters hadn’t ventured outside of their home at all, either. She wondered if any of them dreamed of doing so.

Denomar was smiling again. “Think about it. I’m sure we could devise some kind of home study for you, so you wouldn’t have to physically stay at the academy, as the other students do.”

She did think about it. Over the next few days, as she tried to work on her mapping exercise, she found her mind wandering more and more to the brief two weeks she’d spent in the library at the academy. True, she had found much of the reading she’d done over the past two years to be dull, but maybe that was just because she’d been so focused on her own outcome and frustrated with not getting anywhere. Could she like demonology, if it wasn’t attached to her own experience?

Sal was still trying to decide when something that happened that completely disrupted her ability to think about the future for the time being. Something at court, something that hadn’t happened in years.

They had incoming royal visitors. Not young men vying to solve the mystery of the princesses – it had been months since the last one had come through – nor the return of a noble from the outlying provinces, but a real royal delegation from a country outside of their own.

King Irien announced this, without any forewarning, at dinner a week after Sal’s last conversation with Denomar. He was seating at the high table, surrounded by his presently-favored advisors. Denomar had a place near the end. Henneka, his fourth wife, was seated to his left. She was five months pregnant, so he was favoring her, in hopes that his twelfth living child would be the son he still yearned for. Henneka had two daughters already.

Sal and her sisters were seated at the next table. They never shared a table with their father.

It was during the dessert when the King stood up to speak. It took a minute for the crowd to quiet down as they were meant to; it wasn’t usual for him to say anything, during these meals. Unless they had a visiting questor, in which case the whole court was treated to the same praising and falsely hopeful speech they’d heard dozens and dozens of times.

The King rapped his knuckles on the table as he began to speak. Sal wasn’t sure if he was trying to silence the last few whispers in the hall or if he wanted to give himself some sort of rudimentary fanfare.

“My people,” he announced. His voice was grand, and he spread his arms wide as he spoke. On anyone else, it would have looked like intoxication, but Sal knew her father rarely drank.

“My people. I have the most unexpected of news to give you. We all know that, for almost the last two decades, we have hosted no royal visitors from outside the Kingdom. This has been due to both few neighboring countries being in a position to send delegations, and the misfortune that has fallen upon my own family.”

He always spoke about it like that, in public. Sal had never been sure how much he believed himself, until Denomar told her about the second curse. Now she knew what he meant by “misfortune,” and it made her seethe, so much so that she almost missed the next thing he said.

“However. Our friends to the northeast have undergone a change over the past few years, and I have recently received word that they are finally ready to begin rebuilding our relationship. We shall expect a delegation to arrive within the week.”

With a flourish, the King sat down again. Looking closely, Sal could see him smirking as he surveyed the crowd, which had broken into a rash of mutterings as people realized which country he was talking about. She so rarely saw her father truly smile.

“How long do you think he’s been sitting on this?” Katrionicia said. “Months, probably. But of course he waited to tell everyone until now.”

“I don’t understand that,” Descha responded. “Why wouldn’t he want people to have good news as long as possible?”

Tempora snorted. “He doesn’t care whether we have any good news.”

“No, he does,” Katrionicia disagreed, “but it wouldn’t be worth it in this case. If people knew too soon, other nobles could try and build relationships with the other country or the delegation in advance, or prepare to put their best feet forward to build alliances when the delegation gets here. But he wants to be the sole host and reap all the rewards for himself.”

The rest of the princesses continued talking about how their father would plan to welcome their new allies, but Sal stopped listening. She was thinking about the country to the northeast.

Sal hadn’t had a very extensive education in either history or geography, but she knew about the Sleeping Princess. Everyone did, because five years ago, when Sal was ten, the princess who had been asleep for one hundred years, taking her whole court with her, had woken up. The exact story of what had happened had been slow to emerge, but the new-old country had wasted no time in reasserting borders that had grown over and allowing its armies to be seen patrolling them.

Everyone had wondered how long it would be before the small country opened diplomatic relations again, and apparently, it had taken five years for them to sort out their internal affairs enough to begin doing so. But that wasn’t what Sal was interested in.

After awakening, the Sleeping Princess had become a Queen, and she ruled with another woman alongside her. And what Sal knew about her, what made her so interested to speak to this country’s delegation, when it came, was that this second queen was from the far east and had been under a spell of her own. Sal didn’t know what they had done, but together, the two queens were called the Cursebreakers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (breaking recent habit of authorial silence to admit that this is now a nanowrimo project and no, I don't know where it's going either.)


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Have a map I made two months ago and forgot to link!  
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qTx8aume5sRrrMCA2ps9tKG4R_FKtees/view?usp=sharing

The week she was waiting for the delegation to arrive, Sal found it impossible to turn her mind off for a single minute. Usually she was able to move through her home without paying any attention to the others in the court, but that whole week, she noticed every person she passed in the halls, every eye that lingered on her at breakfast and dinner. At times, she caught herself jumping around the corners, almost afraid of who she was going to meet next.

She just couldn’t stop thinking about the Cursebreakers and wondering if anyone else in the court had reacted to her father’s announcement the same way she had. The nighttime activities of she and her sisters were well-known across the court, even if the real reason behind them wasn’t. For Sal, the news that the Cursebreakers would be coming to her home was a lifeline, and she couldn’t stop wondering if the thought of salvation had occurred to anyone else.

She couldn’t ask her sisters. They had a pact, the older ones, about not providing false hope. It had started in the early days of the King’s published prize – too many times, one of the sisters had taken a liking to that day’s young man, and had asked him subtle questions to figure out if he had any inkling of what was really going on, only to be crushed when it became obvious that he was just as clueless as the last, and they had to drug him anyway. The only sister she’d told any part of her demonology training to was Juniper, who was three years old and liked stories. Sal had been telling her all of the cases she’d studied of people getting out of a deal with a demon. Of course, she’d made them a little more heroic.

Five days after the announcement, a runner arrived at the castle at dinner to breathlessly report that a small entourage would arrive sometime the following day, roughly midmorning. As the princesses retreated to their rooms and prepared for the night, Sal whispered to Angella, “I am not going to be able to focus on anything but tomorrow morning.”

Angella, who was carrying Holly, the present baby, shrugged. “I’m sure it will just be a lot of fanfare. Don’t get yourself worked up.”

“Aren’t you excited for the visitors?”

“I know it will be interesting, but I don’t expect to get to actually talk to them much. You know he’ll just show us off and then send us back.”

Sal couldn’t argue with that logic. But she had made up her mind from the minute she heard who would be visiting that she would find a way to get a message to the Cursebreakers. If one of them came with the delegation, she would make time to talk to them. If neither did, she would write a beautiful letter and send it home with one of the emissaries.

She was still a bundle of nervous energy as they were getting dressed. Angella gave Sal a glance. “Don’t you have some magic work you could be thinking about instead? Calm down.”

Sal did feel a little guilty that she hadn’t yet done the assignment Denomar had given her. Whenever she sat down to finish her description of her nights, she just found her mind wandering, and even though she’d been living the same experience her whole life, she felt like she was missing details or doing a poor job of capturing the setting on paper. So she’d been putting it off, and she hadn’t gone to see Denomar in the morning since her father’s announcement. She didn’t want to hear him say that this was the only thing he could think of to have her do, especially now that she had just a little sapling of hope that there might be another way.

But as she thought about the assignment now, full of anticipation for any encounters the next day might bring, she decided she had better get it done before the delegation arrived, because if the Cursebreakers actually were able to help her with her own plight, she needed as accurate a description as possible of what was happening to her. As she clasped her evening necklace around her neck, she resolved to be observant tonight as she hadn’t been in years, since the journey had become routine. She would try to see it as one of the young men might, if they were ever able to steal along.

But there was no visitor that night, so the routine carried on as it had for as long as Sal could remember. It was Descha’s turn to watch. As the sky dimmed, she stood at the window, and when the last glimmer of light was gone, she motioned to Tempora and Katrionicia, who pulled up the trapdoor in the corner of their sitting room. The planks were heavy and it was almost as large as a regular room door, just set into the floor; it always took at least two of them to lift it. When her oldest sisters had been very small, there had been nursemaids who watched over them and helped with the door. The only others in the castle who were allowed to know the secret. Sal wondered, often, what had happened to them, but she didn’t want to ask.

They descended in order, as they always did. Angella went first, carrying their lantern. The glass rim had chipped several times over the years, and the metal handle was polished shiny from so many sets of royal hands. During the day, it sat unused on a shelf over the trapdoor, next to some stacks of books and an old sample Melandra had done as a child. On one of his rare generous visits, their father had offered to replace it, but Angella had said no.

“It’s just an object, but that lantern has been more constant in my life than any actual human being,” she said to the rest of them, later. Sal remembered watching her sisters all nod. They understood.

Tonight, Melandra carried Holly behind Angella. Juniper, who’d only recently been determined to be old enough to walk, was held tightly in hand by Narian, her next oldest, who was six. Sal, who was three years older than Descha, could still remember the first night when the others had given her her little sister’s hand and told her not to let go until they reached the end of the tunnel.

The worst thing about the tunnel was that it wasn’t even really part of the curse. Well, it was, in that they had to walk through it every night to get where they were going, but while every other part of the Lord of the Frost’s domain carried a faint luminescence, the tunnel was perfectly black save for Angella’s lantern. The princesses walked through, in a straight line, each of them save the first looking only at the feet in front of them.

From the trapdoor, they walked down thirteen stairs. Sal had been counting how many steps it took her to get through the tunnel for years, adjusting every so often as her stride grew longer. Presently, it was about one hundred and thirty four. If she wished, she could reach her arms out and trail her fingers along the sides. The floor of the tunnel was just beaten dirt, but the walls of the tunnel were made of brick, which had always perplexed her. It meant that someone must have built it, once. There had been a period of a few months, when she was about ten, when Sal touched the walls all the way through the tunnel, both at the beginning and end of the night. She told the others it made her feel less lost as they went under. But she’d had to put a stop to it when her father started commenting on her hands at breakfast. Something about the dirt on the tunnel walls made it very difficult to wash off, clinging to the grooves of her fingertips like tree resin.

After the one hundred and thirty four steps, the tunnel opened and they were let out onto a large stone, which sloped gently downward, to the waiting waters of a lake with a surface like a mirror. As there had become more of them, the stone had become more crowded, but somehow all of them always seemed to fit. On the edge of the water, there was a depression in the stone where Angella set her lantern, and then came the waiting.

When it was still, the surface of the lake was glossy, like tempered chocolate poured over a cake. The princesses would stand there for several minutes, just looking. From the stone, all you saw was the lake. The shore curved around it and gently away, tipping towards a horizon with no far land to be seen. Sal had never been to a natural lake, of course, but she’d read about them and knew they were meant to have vegetation growing on the shore. This one had nothing, just empty dirt and occasional glimpses of stone underneath.

No sun or moon hung in the sky, here, but there was that glimmer the tunnel lacked, making everything just barely visible. It was such a strange thing, to look at your sister’s face, see the familiar outline of her nose and watch her mouth move as she whispered something to you, and not be able to see where the light came from by which you could do so.

Nothing in that realm cast a shadow, not even the princesses themselves. When she was younger, Sal once heard her little sister Layda ask Angella if their souls were kept in their shadows, and if that was why they didn’t have them when they were under the domain of the Lord of the Frost. Sal, who thought herself very smart, had intervened and tried to explain how shadows worked, but she couldn’t deny that the question made a certain amount of sense, and had been floundering until Tempora cut her off.

“Of course our souls aren’t stored in our shadows,” she said. “If they were, our father wouldn’t cast one.”

After they’d all been silent for a few minutes, the sheen of the lake’s surface would be broken by a single ripple, and then another, and then five more. Moments later, the disturbances crisscrossed each other. Sal hated the lake more, when it was like this, because the waters danced so much that it wasn’t hard to see shapes in the waves. So many times had she thought she’d seen a fish, only to be reassured that they didn’t live in those waters.

When their whole side of the lake had been churned and consumed, the boats emerged. They came up out of the water, breaking apart the lake unnaturally smoothly and creating no spray, no errant water droplets. If you had happened to look way for just a second, as the first boat came, you might have thought it just appeared on the water.

They fell into an even line, just as the princesses had on their way down. From back where Sal was standing, or at the mouth of the tunnel, they looked empty, propelled only by the wind or the waves.

The first boat tapped the shore, and Angella stepped into it, lifting the hem of her dress carefully above the water. All of them had tried touching the water, at least once. When you first felt it, there was nothing remarkable, just water, but after a few minutes the spot on your skin would begin to ache, like a wasp sting.

One by one, the princesses filed into the boats, Melandra still carrying Holly, who was too little not to squirm out if left on her own. And it was only when you touched the wood of the boat that you could see who was piloting it. The figure of a man, but shaped entirely of a deep blue-black substance, which moved like shadows but felt to the touch like crystalline ice. And there were smoking pits where the eyes should have been.

Once the passenger was seated, the shadow men – one of the princesses had coined the name as a child, and Sal had never thought of anything better – poled the boats away from the shore. Usually, Sal set facing ahead, trying to think of something to entertain herself. A few memorable times, she’d even managed to sleep. While a nap on the boat ride was certainly better than nothing, and others of her sisters found it easier, if you didn’t wake up in time your driver would prop your cheek with a frosted finger, and Sal couldn’t think of a worse way to wake up.

On this night, in her quest to note fresh as many details as possible, she turned and watched the mouth of the tunnel recede. From the lake, the tunnel was set into a small hillside over the stone they departed from. The lantern left on the shore did nothing to penetrate the tunnel’s darkness. Like the lakeshore, the hill it opened from was dry and barren, with nothing growing on it, and some haphazard rocks scattered about.

All of this Sal had seen before, many times, but as she looked that night, she frowned. She blinked and looked again. She saw a small something perched next to the top of the tunnel, on the hillside. It wasn’t large, probably not much larger than her torso, and certainly not large enough for her to notice if she hadn’t been looking for things to notice. And indeed, if it had just been a small bulk of darkness moving among the stones, she would have explained it away as just her mind searching for something new.

But it wasn’t just a dark shape. Near the top, Sal thought it looked like it formed two peaks, like a rabbit’s ears. And the way she could see that was because it was giving off its own light.

The journey over the lake was not actually very long, but the dark molasses of the lake seemed to swallow time as the boats passed over it. By the time the glowing shore came into view, Sal felt hollowed out. They had always been told that the actual borrowing of their souls occurred during the dancing, but she’d long wondered how that could be the case, when she always felt that she weighed less alighting from the boat than she had when she’d entered it.

The shore on the opposite side of the lake didn’t curve around into the distance, like the one they departed from. Instead, it was clear that they were landing on an island, rounded and rising from the water, sides smooth and gleaming. Unlike the place near the entrance to the tunnel, this side had a dock, which the boats kissed softly before the shadow men tied them off. The docks always shone as if they’d just been rained, and in all her fifteen years, Sal had never seen any sign of algae clinging to the boards.

The shadow men gave the princesses a hand out of the boats, and led them up the steps cut precisely into the side of the rock. There were fourteen steps here. Of course Sal had counted them. She’d tried many times to walk up them alone, but there was no railing, and each time her shadow man frowned so terribly that she eventually relented.

The sides of the island and the docks were lit with the same pale glow that haunted the whole realm, but when one had mounted all fourteen steps, she was met with an outburst of light, as the top of the island was covered with a massive gazebo, with a roof and pillars of solid gold. White and silver streamers poured down the pillars and anointed the various chairs and small tables set around the circumference. At first glance, it was always overwhelming, but Sal knew why the structure of the thing had been made so opulent. It was to counter the dance floor set into the base of the gazebo. It ran nearly all the way to the brim, and it was made of ice so black it made a perfect reflection of the roof above.

After all of these years, this whole journey was beyond routine to Sal. She’d done it over and over again, run her hands along every part of her boat, memorized every stone on the lakeshore. But seeing the silent and waiting ice of the dance floor never failed to chill her blood and remind her of the stakes pinned to her soul.

And, less she and her sisters forget who brought them here, the Lord of the Frost stood at the side of the gazebo. He never set foot onto the dance floor, or under the golden roof, but he was always there, watching. Some nights, he circled, and Sal would see him over the shadow man’s shoulder, following first one princess, and then another. Other nights he stood still, only his eyes tracking their flying feet.

Sal could remember the night he spoke to her clearer than she could remember that evening’s meal. She had been ten years old, and as her shadow man led her from the steps to the dance floor, she’d heard a voice saying, “wait.”

It was not the voice she would have expected. The Lord of the Frost softened his consonants and spoke briefly, without a hint of malice. Most of all, it was a voice she would describe as…well, as warm.

He’d taken her hand from the shadow man’s and led her just a few steps away, to a pair of chairs pulled back from the circle but placed to view it. He bid her sit, and when she did, he joined her. His shoulders slumped slightly when he sat, she noticed, and he placed his open palms upward on his knees.

“Princess Saltaire of Demonguard. I’ve told all of your sisters we don’t much care for that name, but you humans persist, so I will grant you your title.” He had been smiling. His teeth had looked fragile, chipped.

“Thank you?” Her little voice had squeaked.

He waved her words away. “I make sure to sit down with every one of you, when you’re old enough. I want to make sure you understand the deal you made, and why you princesses are the most precious thing I have.”

“I didn’t make it,” Sal had said before she could stop herself. If her sisters and her mother had taught her anything, it was that. Repeated to her every day, their own perfectly twisted nursery rhyme. _Our father made a deal, and now we’re cursed against our will._

“It was made on your behalf, and that’s all that matters,” he’d responded. Leaned forward just a little bit, and opened his arms wide. “You see this land, Princess Saltaire of the Demonguard? Isn’t it beautiful?”

She had nodded, frightened of contradicting him again.

“Of course. I built this land, many years ago, to be my respite, my oasis. Well, before I had any of you, this place had been taken from me, and I was consigned to live under the ground, only sending my tendrils of frost out when bidden by the demons of the air and dirt.”

Sal knew this, or at least, she knew where the Lord of the Frost was supposed to live, according to the legends that the uncursed of her countrymen knew.

“I was their best lieutenant, the most fearsome of their weapons in the eternal battle between the land that seeks to lie empty and unfettered and the growths that seek to drain its nutrient for themselves. I’m sure your tutors have taught you about balance, Princess Saltiare; about the balance of the world, and the endless war that holds it that way. I instructed no less.”

She had been told the stories, yes, even in the minimal teaching she’d had. The struggle between death and life, and the demons who served both. When she was older, she would realize that it was described in other lands as a pretty fable to explain away the changing of the seasons - but ever since this conversation with the Lord of the Frost, she’d known that, even if the mechanics were simplified and far beyond her mortal understand, the fundamental story was true.

“But demons fought as demons do, and I was banished from here, my powers diminished, and sent under the ground. I languished there for many years, until your father called me. And it is thanks to the bright, human, above-ground life of your soul, and your sisters, that I may now spend my nights here again. Know that I am ever thankful, Princess Saltaire.”

He patted the arm of her chair. She’d known the feel of the hands of his shadow men since she was a small child, but she’d never seen him touch any of them.

That had been the end of her only audience with the Lord of the Frost.

Now, as she was led up the stairs and onto the dance floor, she searched for him, as she always did. Tonight, he was standing just a step outside the circle, directly across from the stairs, and he was looking directly at each of them as they ascended.

Sal and her sisters took their places ringing the dance floor. When they were all in place, the youngest ones held in the arms of shadow men, they would begin. But just as Sal’s foot was about to land on the black ice, to be caught in unending motion, the voice of the Lord of the Frost echoed out above her head.

He was still standing where he’d been as she entered, and as she looked, she saw his mouth move, but the sound seemed to come from the very peak of the roof.

“My Princesses of Demonguard. It has come to my attention that another demon has chosen to visit my lands this night. As always, the relations between demons and their agents is not something that concerns you. I would just remind you, any communications with another demon or their agent is forbidden while you are on my lands and acting in my service. Thank you.”

Sal had just a moment to remember the shape she’d seen by the tunnel before her foot came down on the ice, and she was whisked away into her curse, to dance and dance and dance, wearing out the soles of her shoes just before the sun rose.


	12. Chapter 12

After all of that build up, the delegation was delayed and didn’t arrive before Sal and her sisters were sent off for their midday sleep. But having lived off practically nothing but the anticipation of the delegation arriving, Sal couldn’t make herself sleep. Instead, she crept from her bed after half an hour and settled herself in the window seat in their study with a pad of paper. Katrionicia was also sitting up, reading a book at one of the desks. She glanced at Sal as she took her seat. “What are you writing?”

“Nothing.”

“I used to keep a journal,” Kat said. “I gave it up when it got boring.”

“Yeah,” Sal said. “I don’t either, but this is something for Denomar.”

Kat nodded. “I heard mom talking to him the other day, after breakfast. He said you’re a good student, and could maybe study demonology, like for real.”

If Denomar was talking about that with her mother, he must have been more serious than Sal realized. She blushed. “He told me that, but I’m not sure how it would work. Anyway,” she paused for a moment; she didn’t talk to her sisters about her studies, but Kat was safer. “I don’t want to give up what I’m doing until I find us a way out.”

“I understand that, and we all think it’s very noble, what you’re doing,” Kat said, which was a surprise to Sal, “but I think you if any of us has a chance at an actual career, you should take it.” She sounded a little wistful. Sal knew – they all knew – that Kat among all of them most resented how cloistered away they were from the rest of court. In a just world, smart Kat would have been working her way up to being a royal councilor by now.

“Yeah,” Sal said, not knowing what else she could say. She went back to her writing, and eventually Kat, yawning, retreated to bed. Sal had gotten so used to struggling through the midday without sleeping in the last couple years that she’d almost forgotten how much her other sisters relied on it. They all got a few hours of sleep in the hours between the dawn and the late-morning breakfast, but for most of them, that hour awake was just a sleepwalk before falling back into bed at noon and waking again a handful of hours later.

Several of the young men, making small talk as the princesses waited for the drugs to kick in, had asked how they handled their backwards lives like that. The answer was just that they’d never known anything else. Early afternoon was for sleeping, and night was for dancing, and when she’d never slept through a night, Sal couldn’t really picture what it must be like.

She spent the next hour and a half recording everything she could remember from the last night’s excursion. She had been meant to write down just a regular night, but she couldn’t help putting in the unusual encounter they’d all had with an angry Lord of the Frost this time, and the shape she’d seen near the entrance to the tunnel.

When they’d returned at dawn, Sal had fixed her eyes on that hillside, looking over every inch from her boat, but she saw nothing. She would almost have said she must have not seen anything after all, except that all night, whirling with her shadow man, she had seen the strange form and her self-contained glow pressed against her eyelids every time she blinked.

When she finished her story, the others were still sleeping, but she was still too wired to lay down. She sat at the window a minute longer, tapping her pencil against her teeth and trying to think of anything she’d left out. When she was sure she’d gotten everything – every damp breeze off the lake, every stone under her foot at the water’s edge – she sprang up and left the princesses’ quarters, latching the door quietly behind her.

It was a bit later than she usually went to see Denomar, but she was pretty sure that he would be in his study just like normal, and she was right. He got right up from the book he was reading to look her writing over.

“This looks thorough,” he said.

“It is. I wrote down everything I could think of about that place.” Sal thought about whether to mention the shape, the other demon, but decided not to. He would find it in there and let her know what he thought.

He nodded approvingly. “Thank you, Saltaire. I will read this tonight.”

“There’s going to be a grand banquet tonight,” she babbled before she could stop herself. “Aren’t you going?”

Denomar considered her for a moment. Sal had come to recognize a particular look he had, when he was just about to tell her something not strictly related to their studies. “I will be there for the start and the food as required of my station. I don’t anticipate needed to mingle much with our guests.”

“You’re not excited to see new people?” Sal was surprised, but she managed to keep herself from mentioning the Cursebreakers. She had decided not to tell Denomar about her hopes that they could help her a week ago, when the announcement was made, and she had stuck to that decision. She didn’t want him to think that she was foolish, or that she was not paying enough attention to how unique Demonguard’s magic was.

“I’m sure they will be interesting enough, as courtiers go,” Denomar said. “But I’m sure you’re looking forward to it. Go get some rest, so you can enjoy yourself.” His tone sounded almost kind, and Sal took the hint to leave, exiting as he bent his gaze back to her papers.

She knew she should at least try to sleep. If she didn’t get any today, she’d end up falling asleep in her boat. But she was still restless, and couldn’t resist taking the long way around to her rooms, just to prolong her time out a little longer. Maybe if she walked enough it would make her feel more tired.

She was rounding a corner near the wives’ quarters when she heard voices.

“Excuse me, could you point me the way of a courtyard or a garden?” an unfamiliar voice said.

Sal stopped, and peered past the stone. Henneka, King Irien’s fifth and present wife, was talking to a woman Sal had never seen before. The woman was taller than Henneka, and dressed in road-weary clothes. Sal’s breath rose in her chest. Could this be one of the delegation, arrived while she and her sisters were supposed to be sleeping?

If she was, Sal couldn’t miss an opportunity to meet her. She stepped around the corner, pouring all of her nervous energy into her footfalls, just as Henneka finished describing directions out to the castle’s gardens.

“I can show you the way, if you’d like,” Sal said, heart pounding.

“Saltaire!” Henneka said. “You aren’t sleeping?” Sal was sure she wanted to say, _why aren’t you sleeping, _but she would never phrase it so boldly. Henneka was always posing questions and statements to Sal and her sisters more uncertainly than she needed to, like she was afraid to be caught assuming a position of authority over anyone other than her natural daughters. She was so young – not that many years older than Angella.

“I was on my way back,” Sal replied, “but I don’t mind adding a little to my walk.” She smiled, hoping she was doing so graciously.

“Alright,” Henneka said. She swept a curtsy to the visitor. “Princess Saltaire will take you there, my Lady,” she said.

“Remember, we’re friends here,” the woman said, watching Henneka as she took a few steps away. Then she turned her full attention to Saltaire. “Thank you for your help, your Highness,” she said.

Saltaire was staring. On one side of the woman’s head, starting just back from her temple, was a fist-sized patch where her dark hair was gone. In its place was a layer of scales. They shimmered as the woman turned her head.

“It is ‘your Highness,’ right?” the woman said. “I don’t have quite the full handle on all of the courtesies yet, especially if they’re foreign.”

“You’re Queen Violet,” Sal said, stupidly. She felt she should curtsy, but she was shaking so much that she knew if she tried she would fall over. But now Queen Violet was looking at her a little strangely, and she felt she had to do something, so she managed a clumsy bow.

“You don’t have to do that,” the Queen said. “How did you know who I am?”

Sal thought saying “your scales” would be rude, so she tapped her own temple. Violet smiled, and Sal thought she looked a little embarrassed.

“Sorry,” Violet said. “I didn’t think about that, or I didn’t know people here would know what it meant.” She reached up and touched the scales, a little awkwardly, running her fingers over them in what looked like a practiced gesture.

“Maybe not everyone,” Sal said, “but I’ve been wanting to meet one of the Cursebreakers since I found out your delegation was coming.”

“The _cursebreakers_,” Violet said. “I _hate _that name.” She rolled her eyes a little bit, and Sal realized just how young she was. She would fit right in with her older sisters.

“I like it,” Sal said, not sure what else to say.

Violet focused more closely on her, and suddenly her youth was gone again. “Wait, you’re one of the princesses.”

Sal understood the implication. “Yes.”

Violet nodded once, slowly. “Okay,” she said. “Show me where the garden is.”

The castle grounds were expansive. Sal knew that, in years past, only one part of the garden had been walled off, with the rest bleeding into a large park that all the city’s residents could access. The walls that now encircled the whole area, eight feet tall, had been finished about twenty years ago, when the King’s family was still young.

Sal had heard her older sisters discourse on the values of keeping such a relaxing space to those in the court, but she was selfishly glad to have such a large garden where she could walk freely. Sometimes when she woke up too heavily from the midday sleep, with drool pressed into her pillow and gummy eyelids, she would go weave her way through the flower gardens until the breeze and the fragrances fully woke her up.

The exit Sal led Violet to took them out through the vegetable garden. Sal had walked just a half step ahead of Violet the whole way, unsure if she should be carrying on small talk or otherwise trying to make conversation. Violet had been silent nearly the whole way. Every time Sal glanced at her, she looked contemplative.

As they came into the sun, Violet finally said, “So, that was your stepmother?”

“Yes,” Sal answered. She brought one hand up against the light. “Henneka. Her daughters are Juniper and Holly, the littlest ones.”

Violet made a soft sort of _oh _sound. “She’s named them after trees,” she said, quietly.

“I guess.” Sal vaguely remembered some court chatter about the unusual choices when the babies had been born.

“She’s from my homeland,” Violet said. “Trees have power, there. I wonder if she’s trying to-“ but she cut herself off, and stopped walking. Sal turned towards her.

“So, these are the gardens,” Sal said, remembering that she was supposed to be playing tour guide for their guest.

“They’re lovely,” Violet said. Her statement was a little disjointed, but she was looking around, and Sal thought she looked genuinely interested. She remembered that Violet didn’t come from royalty, and had only lived that way for a few years. Well, no one knew exactly where Violet came from, but no court Sal had ever heard of had claimed her.

“We should sit down,” Violet went on. “I think you have questions you want to ask me, right?”

Sal blushed and nodded. She led Violet to a stone bench, crouching under a rather weak crabapple tree.

Violet didn’t sit like a noble. She leaned back on her hands and studied Sal’s face until Sal started to feel too watched, so she sat down next to her.

“How old are you?” Violet asked.

“Fifteen.”

“And how many sisters are before you?”

“I’m the fifth one.”

There was a pause. Sal wasn’t sure if Violet was thinking of something to say, or if she was studying her some more, but she decided to fill the quiet. “When we heard the news about what you did, a few years ago, I couldn’t stop thinking about it,” she said. “I didn’t know there were other princesses like us.” She stopped, because Violet was frowning.

“I’m sorry,” the foreign Queen said, “but it’s really not the same thing. I’ve never been in a situation like yours.”

“But your curse-“

“I didn’t break it,” Violet interrupted, and with her words, a small green frog fell from her lips into her lap. She absently stroked its back with one finger before it hopped off into the grass and disappeared.

“And even if I had,” she went on, “it doesn’t constrain me like yours does, to one location. I’m sorry,” she said again.

“Maybe break is the wrong word,” Sal pressed her, “but you twisted it, defeated the witch and stole her power for yourself.”

One side of Violet’s mouth went up in some stillborn smile, and she looked a little embarrassed. “They say something similar in my home, too. The story got so messed up in the telling. My power was given to me, like this. I just had to figure out how to use it. Not every halfling manages to do that, and that’s why they talk about me like they do.”

“Oh.” Sal didn’t really know what that meant, but there was another part of the story she was sure she had right. “But the sleeping Princess – I mean the Queen – woke up, and her curse was broken.”

Violet really smiled at that, the first time Sal had seen her do so. “Thorn’s curse was fulfilled, and when that bitch tried to take more from her, I throttled her until she left us alone. I suppose you could say we broke it, if you wanted.” Her face turned serious again. “But yours doesn’t have a time limit like that, does it?”

“No,” Sal said.

“I’m happy to talk about it,” Violet said, a little more softly. “If you just want to talk, or maybe I have some ideas. But if you’re looking for a key, I’m afraid I don’t have it.”

Sal nodded, and looked at the ground. “Maybe if I tell you how it is, it will be more similar than you think,” she offered. So for the second time that day, the story of her most recent trip into the darkness came spilling out. But this time she felt drained by the experience, like every word was going directly to the Lord below the ground, just as her soul did every night.

Every once in a while, Violet asked a brief question to clarify something, but mostly she was quiet as Sal talked. At one point, as Sal was almost at the end, her voice wavered a bit, and something tickled her wrist. She looked down, and a small lizard had wrapped itself around it. As Sal looked, a tiny tongue darted out and brushed the bottom of her thumb.

“I find them comforting sometimes,” Violet said, almost shyly. Sal looked at her, and saw another frog perched on her cheek.

“Thank you,” Sal said. She did find the little lizard comforting. Its body was warm. She cleared her throat and continued talking.

When she finished, Violet said, “Well, I still don’t think I have the answer for you. But I’ll think about it, and in the meantime, are you getting enough sleep?”

Sal shrugged. “I get as much sleep as I get,” she said. “I skip our nap a lot, but it works out okay.”

“I think…you probably need to sleep better,” Violet said. She jumped up, and Sal almost startled, it was so sudden. “Walk me back to my room, and I’ll give you something.”

Sal led the way back. After they’d gone back through the vegetable in silence, she asked, “Would you mind telling me a little more about what exactly you did? I know you said it wasn’t cursebreaking, but…”

“Sure,” Violet said. “It was pretty simple. When you’re cursed like I am, where something is added to you, it becomes part of you. My sister figured it out before me, and she learned how to control what her mouth did. It took me a lot longer to learn how to do that, but I realized that if I decided the magic inside of me belonged to me, and not to the witch who put it there, I would be the same as her. Someone made of magic and flesh mixed together. And the thing about witches is, they are very…proprietary. Their skin doesn’t react well to magic that isn’t theirs.”

“I still don’t really understand how you did it,” Sal said. “How did you decide it belonged to you?”

“I don’t know if I can describe that, exactly,” Violet said, slowly. “I just accepted that it was part of myself. The same way I would say that I have dark hair, or have a sister, or am in love. I knew I controlled my magic, so I did.

“To be honest,” she went on, “your situation sounds like kind of the opposite of mine. I had something added to me, that I learned how to control. You have something taken away from you, every night.”

“I don’t know if it’s taken away, really,” Sal said, even though she had sometimes thought of it that way before. “I don’t get a whole soul when I’m up here because the deal is binding all the time.” It was one of the fundamental rules of demonology she’d learned with Denomar: demons rule even when not physically present. “It’s more like, I have two halves, and when I’m up here, one side is lit up, and at night, the other side is lit up. But they’re always both there.”

Violet made a humming noise, like she was thinking, but said nothing else. They arrived back at her chambers, and she ducked inside, emerging a few minutes later with something clutched in her hand and a wrinkled nose.

“They aren’t happy I left for a bit, alone,” she said. “I still don’t like diplomats. I didn’t tell them about you, I assume that’s good?”

“Yes,” Sal said.

“Good.” Violet opened her hand and held it towards Sal. Sitting on her palm was a plain ring, woven of some kind of grass. It looked fragile. Sal picked it up carefully between two fingers.

“My wife made that,” Violet said. “Put it on your finger, and you’ll sleep undisturbed for at least a few hours. It wears off after a while.”

“What if someone tries to wake me up?”

“They won’t be able to, not unless they try very hard. It’s a fairly weak charm, but I thought it might help with your naps.”

“Thank you,” Sal said. “Don’t you need this?”

“Well,” Violet said, and she was wearing her glowing smile again, “I usually sleep alright. Thorn’s been trying to find ways to spread her curse out a little among people who could use it, so I brought some items along to test them out. She won’t miss it. But let me know how it goes and I’ll report back.”

“Okay,” Sal said. She found herself smiling, too. She took the ring back to her room, and sure enough, fell immediately into a dreamless sleep for the rest of the afternoon.


	13. Chapter 13

Just three days after Violet and her small entourage arrived in the city, King Irien announced that he would be leaving.

It was at another banquet, of course. Making grand proclamations at banquets seemed to be the only part of his job their father enjoyed. Katrionicia had once made friends with a junior gardener who would sneak her political pamphlets from the city, and all of the sisters would review them, trying to figure out what the rest of his citizens thought of the King. Sal remembered how vindicated they’d all felt when they found one calling for his resignation, only to further discover that the authors were protesting the number of different and unqualified women he’d made his queens, not the way he treated his daughters.

“It’s not our mothers’ fault he picks them,” Tempora had fumed. “It’s not their fault he’s trying to break the deal he made by throwing darts at a map.”

After the casting aside of his first wife, Vasia, who had been a court-sanctioned match with a very noble house, King Irien had married a servant girl, seemingly wanting to swing as far away from his original choice as possible. But Kaylan had died not long after Tempora was born. Saltaire’s mother was the daughter of a merchant and the granddaughter of a noble house in the land to their east, and the fourth wife, Enlee, hailed from the far western deserts of their own country. And Henneka, of course, came from Violet’s country, catching the King’s eye when she was brought to the city in the care of an aunt seeking a better life.

Henneka was seated at the King’s side again when he announced that he would be embarking on a journey to their neighboring country. “Having our esteemed guests here has made me realize fully the value of consorting with one’s ruling peers, and the companionship it brings,” he said, gesturing broadly at Violet, sitting on his wife’s other side. She did not look impressed by his words. “So I have decided to pay a visit to my old friend to our east. He has suffered such a tragic loss and he must be in need of comfort and companionship as well. I intend to leave immediately.”

Across the table from Sal, Angella raised an eyebrow at Katrionicia, the most politically-astute of them. Kat shrugged. “Nothing new’s happened there,” she said. “I don’t know what he’s talking about.”

Melandra rolled her eyes. “It’s the old gossip,” she said. “About the princes disappearing.”

“But that was years ago,” Tempora said.

“What happened?” Sal asked.

Melandra flicked a hand in the air. “I think it was, oh, four years ago? Five? You were just a kid. There were all these news reports that the King was taking his sons south to choose brides, and everyone here got all excited that maybe he would come here next, and they could offer their own daughters. There were a lot of princes, maybe five?”

“Six,” Tempora said. “I remember because Narian was a baby and there were three more of us than them.”

“Sure, six then. I think one of them did get married, or was going to. But almost as soon as they started, the news reports stopped again, and then there were all these rumors, that the princes had vanished.”

“It was popular for creepy stories out in town for a little bit,” Tempora said. They all knew that she snuck out into the city more than any of them. “They were saying that the bride from the south turned out to be a witch or something. The princes all turned into the wind, or ducks, or just vanished from their beds. Nonsense like that. I bet their protective father just keeps them close at hand now that one’s married. But they made for good stories before it got tired.”

“That court’s always attracted tragedies, or stories about tragedies,” Melandra added. “Ever since the Queen died, when you were a toddler, Sal. It doesn’t mean anything, but I guess it’s a good pretense for him to go visit.”

“So, what’s the real reason, you think?” Tempora asked.

“No idea,” Melandra said. “Maybe he just wants to get away from our guest. She doesn’t look like she’s as supplicant as he would like.” She bared her teeth in a mocking smile.

Sal, who had kept her conversation with Violet to herself until she could figure out how she felt about it, thought that Melandra was probably right.

Angella sighed suddenly. “No. Well, that might be part of it, but I just remembered something. I know why he’s going.”

She paused, and they all looked at her. “Are you going to tell us?” Tempora finally prompted.

Angella sighed again. “Well. When all those stories were going around, most people were talking about the princes, but I remember something from before that. Before all those sons, the King and Queen over there had a daughter. Mother used to tell me that maybe, if I was good, I could meet her and we could be friends. She was just a little older than me.”

There was a silence as they all tried not to look at Henneka, seated at their father’s side, only months from delivering what was sure to be her third and final daughter.

True to his word, King Irien and a fairly moderate retinue left just two days later. All of his daughters were called upon to stand, nicely lined up, and wave him off. As soon as he was out of sight and they had been released, Sal went to find Denomar. She had been avoiding him for days, because she didn’t want to hear that he’d read her manuscript and there was nothing to be done, but with her father gone she felt it was finally time to get it over with.

She knocked on his door, and when he answered, he said, “I was wondering when I was going to see you back. I have some thoughts.”

Sal let herself in and sat down with only a little bit of a flounce. “Just tell me. I’m getting used to getting bad news.”

Denomar looked puzzled, but didn’t inquire. Sal was glad. She still didn’t want to talk about her conversation with Violet.

“Well,” he said, “I’m afraid I still have no idea how to break your curse. But I do have some information I can fill in which I think you might find interesting.”

Sal perked up a little. “Really?”

Denomar handed her two items, a heavy book with a page marked and a single scroll. “Read these,” he said. He sat back down at his own desk, clearly intending to give her some time to review them while he went back to his own work.

Sal started with the scroll. It was a brief document, the work of a scholar from several decades ago. As she looked it over, she realized it was unpublished; there was no seal of the Academy or the royal court marking it as recorded into the official annals of endorsed demonology. “Is this someone’s draft?” she asked.

Denomar didn’t turn around. “Part of a thesis that didn’t make it into the final version,” he said. “A student of mine, from several years ago. I told him then that it didn’t have enough evidence and wasn’t close enough to his main focus for inclusion.”

Sal had heard several mentions of Denomar’s previous students over the years. She looked back at the page and started to read.

_Traditional study has attributed the relative rarity of the highest order of human-demonic binding to the danger such an arrangement possesses, and the practice of the Academy to caution against such ventures when approached. But I question this assertion; we scholars must know from observation of human nature that men are not so prudent as to be put off from the promise of power by the inherent danger it holds, nor dissuaded from folly by a high price. _

Sal laughed aloud. “I like him,” she said.

“Yes, I thought you might,” Denomar said. “His whole first draft was like that. I had to do quite a bit of editing to get it in the correct formal style.”

Sal thought that was a shame. She read on.

_On the contrary, I propose that one cause of the apparent rarity of deals of this sort must be the effort required for a demon to enact it. As we know, such arrangements are typically seen far more advantageous to the demon than the human when carried out; surely, if the benefits are so great, demons would be constantly tempting humans to partake in them. Yet enticements of such type are not often reported by the common man, and when they are, the demon in question is usually one of atypical power or of a particularly unsavory sort. The deals of this kind that are known to us vary in exact outcome, but all have two things in common: a demon of exactly this type, and an especially vulnerable or desperate man. From these observations, we can conclude that the act of creating or carrying out a binding is surely costly enough to only make it worth it when the demon is assured of a good enough reward. _

_ But what is this cost? Much further study will be required to acquire the exact answer, but my initial suggestion is that it requires the act of an intermediary. One of the few complete and first-hand stories of a human-demonic binding is that of Hyran the Blacksmith. Hyran had made a deal with a demon of the flame that, in exchange for two years of a constant fire and good business, he would forfeit the last ten years of his life. Hyran told the demonologist who interviewed him that, for the duration of the two years, he was required to wear a medallion against his chest under his clothes, performing a simple ritual with it at dusk each day. We know a good deal about the makeup of this medallion because Hyran spoke at length about how its dark, shiny material, somewhere between burnished metal and polished rock, was unlike any he’d seen before. Further study will be necessary to determine what this material may be and how it is related to the binding between man and demon _

The manuscript ended there. Sal looked up, eager for more. “Is that is?” she asked.

Denomar turned from his desk. “No. As I said, I encouraged him to keep those speculations from his paper because he had no further evidence than you have there.”

“Why haven’t I heard about Hyran the Blacksmith before?” Sal had thought she’d read every accounting of a binding. She’d been sure of it.

Denomar grimaced. “That account has been stricken from most records, especially those held at the Academy, because a few years after my student completed his work, it was discovered that Hyran had lied to the demonologist who took his statements and paid him off to obscure evidence.”

“What? Why would someone do that?” Sal knew from her reading that firsthand accounts of bindings were so rare largely because most people who’d agreed to one were too ashamed to share their stories with an academician, even under an alias. She’d never heard of anyone going to the trouble of making up a fake story.

“It’s not that interesting a tale, really. Hyran had mentioned that he had such an arrangement to an acquaintance when intoxicated, and the acquaintance told a friend who worked at the Academy and was looking for such stories. When the demonologist asked Hyran if he was willing to tell him about the deal he’d made, Hyran made up a story that he’d traded two years of prosperity for ten years of life. Well, it turned out that he had in fact traded two years for ten, but it was ten years of his life for two years of being able to see his mistress with no fear of discovery.”

Sal made a horrible face, and Denomar laughed. “Yes. Hyran was not an honorable man, or even a sensible one. The report that uncovered all of this speculated that he had later agreed to an extension of the arrangement, but that was unproven. Hyran died at age thirty-nine before the truth came out, so we never had the opportunity to ask him.

“So you can see why the academic community has dismissed everything in Hyran’s original story as hearsay. How are we to know what was true to the actual deal and what was made up for the demonologist’s sake? But when I read your account…”

He trailed off, but Sal knew what he meant. The way the document described the medallion was eerily familiar, but – “The dance floor is made of ice,” she said. “That’s what we always thought, anyway. And when you – it couldn’t be anything else. I know what ice feels like beneath my feet.”

“Yes,” Denomar said, “but it would make sense for your demon to make his binding material out of ice, just as it would make sense for a fire demon to shape one out of stone. And there’s the different nature of the arrangements to account for as well. But I think we can say that at least one part of Hyran’s story was true.”

“He doesn’t walk on it,” Sal said. “And if it’s something else that makes it special, something he bound with ice, like the other demon bound with stone…” She had an idea, but she took a breath before saying it, wary of looking silly. “He seemed to not be able to have a say over other demons entering the underground, the other night, or at least not be able to control them. What if the material comes from some other demon, and he can’t actually control it?”

Denomar was nodding. “I had thoughts along those lines. I don’t know if we can say for sure, yet, whether the material was made by another demon, or is just dangerous to the Lord of the Frost is some other way unrelated to where it comes from. But I think our new line of study should be understanding just how these demons relate to each other, in the underground.” He tipped his chin at the book in her hand. “I think you should look at your other reading.”

The book fell open to the page he had marked. Sal was familiar with this book. She’d felt its worn leather and uneven binding many times before. It was a demon reference book, almost a dictionary, compiling all the demons reported by man. She’d never been required to read the whole thing, fortunately, but it had been a frequent source for background as she’d made her way through Denomar’s readings.

The page he had set aside for her contained a brief, two-paragraph description of a demon she’d never heard of before.

_The Clever One. Also known as the Trickster, the Sly Demon, the Keeper of Tricks. This demon appears in the shape of a rabbit or a hare, either lifesize or somewhat larger than life. He can be invoked by or connected to tricks and deceptions of all kinds, but unlike other demons who deal in deception and disguise, he is most likely to guard over tricks made in the protection of one’s family, home, or property. _

_ Accounts of direct aid offered or lent to humans are uncommon, but some scholars suggest that this is due to a presently low awareness of this demon among the general population, causing him to be infrequently beseeched or sought out. When aid has been recorded, it is almost always in the form of advice or guidance, rarely in miracles or direct intervention. One power this demon does appear to have is the ability to cross boundaries at will, with little regard for or consequence from other demons. Regardless of size, the identifiable feature is a slight glow about the ears._

Sal looked up from the book and met Demonar’s waiting gaze.

“I think,” she said, “I should attempt to learn more about this demon.”

“Yes,” he said. “I think that would be very wise.”


End file.
